20 Tajik Islamists Held for 'Plot to Blow Up' Road Tunnels

Police in Tajikistan have arrested 20 alleged Islamists for plotting to blow up two key road tunnels in the central Asian country, officials said Saturday.

"The Islamists wanted to blow up the strategic tunnels" which link the center to the north of the impoverished ex-Soviet republic, an interior ministry spokesman told Agence France-Presse.

He claimed all those held had returned to the country after fighting against President Bashar Assad's regime in Syria.

More than 200 Tajiks, most young unemployed radical Islamists, are now fighting in Syria, according to the authorities.

Islamists were deeply involved in a bloody five-year civil war in the secular, majority-Muslim country that ended in 1997. Tajikistan been led since 1992 by former Soviet apparatchik Emomali Rakhmon.