A military helicopter crashed in Tajikistan Wednesday in a possible militant strike killing 25 troops, military sources said, although public statements insisted only four were killed in an accident.
The helicopter, a Mi-8 with a capacity of around 25 troops, was travelling from the capital Dushanbe to the Rasht Valley in east Tajikistan which has been wracked by growing Islamist unrest.
"A Mi-8 military helicopter of the Tajik national guard suffered a crash in the east of the country. Four members of the crew were killed and three wounded," the Tajik national guard said in a statement.
The helicopter hit a powerline, sending it into a river shortly before it was due to land at an airstrip, the statement said.
But a high-ranking Tajik military source, speaking on condition of strict anonymity, told AFP that 18 members of the elite Alfa military division were killed in the crash as well as seven members of the national guard.
The source said that it was possible that the helicopter had been shot down by a missile fired by Islamists from their mountain hideouts.
"It is possible that the Islamists could have shot down the Mi-8 from the mountains when it was not far from landing at Rasht airstrip," the source said.
There was no official confirmation of the comments but other officials with knowledge of the incident also told AFP that the death toll was much higher than originally reported.
The helicopter was flying from the capital of Dushanbe to the Rasht Valley region around 200 kilometres (125 miles) to the east, where government forces are carrying out a massive operation to detain suspected Islamist insurgents.
The spike in unrest in Tajikistan, which shares a porous border with Afghanistan, has come after 25 Al-Qaeda-linked militants escaped from a prison in a brazen nighttime getaway in August that killed six guards.
Twenty-eight soldiers were killed in an ambush on a military convoy in the Rasht Valley in September. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an Al-Qaeda-linked militant group, later claimed responsibility for the attack.
Tajikistan has launched a huge military operation to hunt down the militants since the ambush, with officials saying that a dozen militants have already been killed as well as five members of the security forces.
If it was proven that the helicopter crash was the result of a militant strike, it would deal a major blow to confidence into the government's efforts to quell the unrest.
Tajikistan, a majority-Muslim country and the poorest state to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago, has suffered a string of recent attacks that the government blames on Islamist militants.
The IMU — branded a terrorist organisation by the United States — was founded in the late-1990s in Tajikistan with the goal of overthrowing Uzbek President Islam Karimov and creating an Islamic Sharia law state in the ex-Soviet republic.
Tajikistan, where a bloody civil war between Islamist forces and backers of Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, shares a porous 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) border with Afghanistan.
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