MOSCOW, Nov 28: The failed assassination bid against Turkmenistan’s authoritarian leader Saparmurat Niyazov could have been staged by his own secret services, a Russian human rights campaigner said on Thursday.

Early this year, Niyazov foiled a coup plot by the secret services and purged them, sentencing his once powerful security chief Mukhamad Nazarov to 20 years in jail in June, said Vitaly Ponomarev from the Moscow-based Memorial human rights body.

The new head of country’s national security committee was then fired in September, while many long-serving officers who made their careers in the Soviet-era KGB have been replaced, Ponomarev added.

“Niyazov did not need to mount a fake murder bid to unleash a fresh purge, but the secret service men were terribly afraid of one,” the expert told AFP.

The eccentric leader of Turkmenistan, a largely desert but gas-rich Central Asian nation that borders Iran and Afghanistan to the south, has repeatedly cracked down on corrupt officials.

“But from 2000, repression started to affect officials whose faults were fabricated. The privileged elite began to take fright,” said Ponomarev.

The human rights activist cited an anonymous report on the Turkmen opposition website www.gundogar.org, saying that Niyazov was in a panic as he arrived at the presidency after the attack and “ordered a general alert.”

The president has accused exiled opposition leaders of organising the shooting attack on his motorcade in the capital Askhabad Monday. Several dozen of their relatives in Turkmenistan have since been detained.

Former deputy agriculture minister, Sapar Yklymov, whom Niyazov has labeled as the organizer of the assassination attempt, said that 120 members of his family had been arrested, including his daughter.

Speaking to AFP by telephone from Sweden, where he lives in exile, Yklymov said he would try to use international law to get his family released.

“We are in discussions with lawyers to launch international legal action,” he said.

Former foreign minister Boris Shikhmuradov, also branded as one of the ring-leaders, appealed to the Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe to “prevent arrests and mass repressions of innocent people in Turkmenistan, following false accusations by Niyazov’s regime,” in a statement on the opposition website.

Known as Turkmenbashi or Father of all Turkmen, Niyazov has ruled the Central Asian republic since 1985 when he was named Communist Party chief, holding onto power after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

He has built a Stalin-style personality cult and amassed almost absolute power, in 1999 declaring himself president-for-life.—AFP