DUSHANBE, Tajikistan
A network of schools run by the U.S.-based preacher, Fethullah Gulen, in Tajikistan will be shut down and reopened as state-run schools with different names, a Tajik minister announced Thursday.
Tajikistan’s Minister of Education and Science Nuriddin Said told a press conference in the Tajik capital Dushanbe Thursday that the ministry had prepared all necessary legal documents to shut down the Gulen-run schools, which had been under an investigation since early 2015.
The schools would become state schools at the start of the following academic year and even the names of the schools would be changed, the minister said.
The schools would also undergo changes in the pattern of their education system and curriculum, Abdujabbor Aliyev, head of the ministry’s Early Childhood and Primary Education Department, said.
“The founder of these schools, the Selale Educational Institutions, will also lose its status,” Alivey said.
The first Gulen-run school opened in Tajikistan in 1992.
The Turkish government accuses the Gulen movement of infiltrating key institutions, including police, judiciary and bureaucracy inside Turkey.
