KEY POINTS:
Two-and-a-half weeks before he was gunned down in the Kyrgyz city of Osh, journalist Alisher Saipov told me he was becoming a celebrity.
His picture, he explained, had made its way into state television news bulletins across the border in Uzbekistan.
The Uzbek report described the 26-year-old reporter
as dangerous, an enemy of the state, perhaps even a terrorist with a hidden agenda of overthrowing the government of Uzbekistan. There were even rumours that the Uzbeks had a US$10,000 price on his head.
"I am, of course, disappointed that I am only worth $10,000," Alisher said with a cheeky smile as we drank tea at a cafe in Osh. "Islam Karimov is being a bit cheap," he laughed.
I did not laugh with him. Being an enemy of Uzbek President Islam Karimov is a serious matter, and Alisher, one of Central Asia's most outspoken journalists, knew it all too well.
In his reports for Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and various regional websites, Alisher wrote endlessly about torture in Karimov's prisons, the brutal clampdown on dissent, the climate of fear and the total economic collapse of Central Asia's most populous state.
An ethnic Uzbek himself, he had dedicated his entire short life to covering one of the world's most oppressive states. Two weeks before an unidentified gunman fired three bullets into his head and chest, Alisher, gleaming with pride and excitement, showed me the latest issue of his new Uzbek-language newspaper. Published in Kyrgyzstan and smuggled into Uzbekistan, it was the only Uzbek-language print publication that dared to challenge the authorities.
He said he hoped the increasing popularity of the newspaper signalled change. He was cautiously hopeful that the people of Uzbekistan were beginning to wake up from two decades of Karimov's repression and that next month's presidential election, in which Karimov will seek re-election, could have offered a chance for change.
Only one thing made him more proud and excited than his paper, he smiled: his 3-month-old baby daughter.
The first time I met Alisher was after the May 2005 events in the Uzbek city of Andijan, when government troops fired at demonstrators, killing hundreds.
Alisher took me to see the refugees hiding from persecution on the Kyrgyz side of the border. In every home we visited, we heard stories of fear, fury and brutality on an unbelievable scale.
The refugees told of bodies piled in Andijan's streets, government troops chasing and firing at women and children, the arrests in the middle of the night that carried on long after the guns fell silent.
Their stories were consistent, but impossible to verify. While the UN called the events in Andijan the biggest massacre of civilians since China's Tiananmen Square, President Karimov said no more than 187 people, mostly Islamic radicals, died as his troops fought what he called "dangerous militants".
Karimov refused calls for an international inquiry, jailed hundreds of people for alleged connection to the events and closed down dozens of Western non-governmental organisations. After the US criticised the massacre, the President retaliated by shutting down an American military base and sealing off the country to most international journalists.
Karimov's message to the world was clear: the story of Andijan was over; Uzbekistan was ready to move on. But a slim, boyish reporter who lived across the border refused to listen.
Methodical, thorough and passionate, Alisher dug deeper than anyone else into the little-known reality of Karimov's Uzbekistan. It was his investigation that first revealed how the Uzbek Government took its fight against dissent beyond the country's borders.
Alisher gathered piles of material that showed Uzbek security services were behind the kidnapping and deportation of dozens of refugees. He wrote that the Government suppression of dissent was the reason behind the rise of radical Islamic movements across Central Asia. He criticised the Kyrgyz authorities for sharing intelligence and conducting joint security sweeps with their Uzbek counterparts, and warned that Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan were facing increasing danger.
Two days before he was killed outside his office in Osh, Alisher told his friends he believed he was being followed by the Uzbek security services.
The Siyosat (Politics) newspaper office is now closed. His shocked colleagues say they fear intelligence-sharing between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan could mean many people in Alisher's vast network of contacts may be in danger.
Alisher's death is causing a stir. There is a sense of public outrage and there is pressure on Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev to find the killers.
All of this is, so ironically, becoming a story that Alisher would have loved to cover - just as much as he would have loved to laugh at the fact that he seems to have lost his celebrity status in Uzbekistan.
For across the border, Alisher's murder does not seem to have made a single headline. Those who have called him an "enemy of the state" failed to report that on October 24, 2007, Alisher Saipov, one of the region's most courageous, most outspoken journalists, fell silent. Observer
* Natalia Antelava is the Central Asia correspondent for the BBC.
