Turkmenistan’s political police recently evicted a Protestant Christian pastor with his wife and two children from their home near Ashgabad, confiscating their personal deed of ownership and sealing the gate to prevent their return.
Two other families in his congregation remain under house arrest, apparently slated to lose their private homes as well, said an Ashgabad source.
On Dec. 9 officials of the National Security Committee (KNB) gave Shokhrat Piriyev and his family one day to pack up and vacate their home in Bagyr village, nine miles from central Ashgabad in the Ahal region. Before evening the same day, the KNB came and sealed the gate to the house. Located at No. 43 Sowhoznaya Street, the small three-room house of the Turkmen pastor has been confiscated as government property under an official resolution issued by the district governor. Piriyev had purchased the home in September and moved into it in late October.
Piriyev, 27, is now under KNB orders to move back to his hometown of Turkmenabad (formerly Charjou) near the country’s eastern border.
“They forced me to write the letter (to) give my house to the property of the government,” Piriyev told a source Dec. 10. After Piriyev was forced to sign over his house ownership papers to the government, the head of the local KNB visited his wife Nurowa Mahpura, coercing her with threats to add her signature to the document.
“They want us to go to Charjou to live, and we don’t know what to do,” the pastor admitted. With his wife, daughter Shaira, 7, and son Dawut, 6, Piriyev is staying temporarily with another family in the capital, Ashgabad.
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