Officers of Tajikistan’s Drug Control Agency detained 22-year-old I.N. and placed him in the agency’s temporary detention facility.[1] He was the nephew of the 29-year-old owner of a house in the Dusti jamoat of Vahdat district and lived in that house.[1] He had no prior convictions and was temporarily unemployed.[1] The agency’s investigation department opened a criminal case against him under article 200 part 4 of the Penal Code for especially large-scale drug trafficking for sale.[1]

Acting on operational information that drugs were stored in the house, officers searched it with a service dog named Richi and found a plastic bag of pressed dark substance inside an iron chest buried in the hayloft.[1] The agency’s forensic laboratory identified the substance as hashish weighing about 20 kilograms.[1] The state news agency Khovar likewise reported that the agency’s officers seized about 20 kg of drugs in the house.[2] The English-language account dates the discovery in the house to 1 August 2011.[3]

Investigators said he had bought the drug from a citizen of Afghanistan and kept it hidden for some time.[1] He planned to move it by vehicle through the border district of Jirgital into Kyrgyzstan.[1] Vahdat district lies about 20 kilometres east of Dushanbe.[3]