(Reuters) Tajik journalist Temur Varki received a disquieting call from Paris police in late March, days after Islamic State militants from his homeland allegedly carried out a massacre in Moscow.
The two officers questioned him about France’s tiny community of immigrants from Tajikistan, an impoverished former Soviet republic in Central Asia.
“Who do you know? How many? Where?” Varki recalled the officers asking, with one of them speaking Russian, a commonly used language across Central Asia. Varki, a political refugee in France who has worked for outlets including the BBC, told the police callers he knew a handful of Tajiks in the country, mainly fellow emigres and dissidents.
“But I don’t know any jihadists,” he told them.
