"The Chortoq district court in Namangan Region sentenced Ikrom Teshaboyev to five years in a general security prison under the Uzbek Criminal Code’s article on human trafficking," he said.

He said that having promised and deceived six Uzbek citizens to find a job for them at a tinned food factory in the city of St Petersburg "where wages are from 500 to 1,000 dollars", Ikrom Teshaboyev trafficked them into Russia. "However, the victims did not find themselves in a tinned food factory, but were doing hard jobs to construct a psychiatric clinic. Under a pretext of registration, Teshaboyev took away their passports and appropriated their wages totalling to about 6,000 dollars," the official told the agency. He noted that the court ruled that the defendant should repay 7,840,000 soums (about 6,000 dollars) to the victims.