DUSHANBE, August 4. /TASS/. Six Tajik citizens from the town of Somoniyon bordering Kyrgyzstan have been wounded by an unprovoked shot from a hunting gun from the Kyrgyz territory, Tajikistan’s State Committee for National Security said on Tuesday, accusing the Kyrgyz side of escalating the cross-border conflict.
According to the committee’s press service, the conflict between residents of the frontier districts of the two countries flared with new vigor on Tuesday morning. "At first, both sides began throwing stones at each other, then came a shot from a fowling piece from the Kyrgyz territory," the Tajik side said.
For their part, the Kyrgyz border guards have vehemently refuted this information. According to them, "a single shot from a smooth-bore gun" was made on the territory of a neighboring country. "Our border guards didn’t use weapons during the conflict, no one here was affected by the shot," Kyrgyzstan’s border guard service said.
The conflict between residents of the frontier areas of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan emerged in the area of Maiskaya on Monday after Tajik citizens blocked the road to the cemetery of the Kyrgyz village of Koktash. In response its residents blocked the channel that supplies water to the Tajik village of Chorku.
Tajikistan’s expert community has linked the conflicts on the border between the two neighboring republics that have become more frequent recently to the protracted process of delimitation of the disputed border areas as well as the existence of national enclaves on the territories of the two countries. To date, only two-thirds of more than 900-kilometer Tajik-Kyrgyz border have been delimited.