**A former Tajik minister, Mirzo Ziyoyev, who allegedly joined a drug-trafficking gang, has been shot dead by his new comrades, officials say.**The Interior Ministry said he was arrested on Saturday and then agreed to reveal the gang’s hidden weapons and negotiate the surrender of its leader.
But a gun battle erupted at the talks, killing Ziyoyev and wounding several officers, Tajik officials said.
Ziyoyev was a powerful rebel commander in the 1990s Tajik civil war.
The five-year war pitted the Moscow-backed government against a mostly Islamist opposition, of which Ziyoyev was a key player.
He was appointed the emergency services minister as part of a power-sharing agreement in 1997, but was dismissed three years ago.
Foreign fighters
Tajik officials said he was arrested on Saturday in connection with an armed attack on a police post in the eastern Rasht Valley, close to the Afghan border.
The other members of the group included a Tajik Islamic fighter and five Chechen nationals. They have been taken to the capital Dushanbe for questioning, officials told Reuters news agency.
The Rasht Valley - a former opposition stronghold - had been sealed off since May for what the Tajik authorities say is an annual anti-narcotics operation.
But some independent observers say the government is fighting armed militant groups that include foreign fighters, according to the BBC’s Central Asia correspondent Rayhan Demytrie.