Explosion in Tajik capital ahead of EU conference

(Adds European Commission comment)

By Roman Kozhevnikov

DUSHANBE, Nov 14 (Reuters) - A bomb exploded in Tajikistan on Wednesday outside a building where the country's prime minister had been due to attend an EU-organised conference, officials and witnesses said.

A security guard died in the blast which took place just 300 metres (yards) from the presidential palace in the capital Dushanbe, law enforcement officials said, adding they were treating the case as a possible act of terror.

A Reuters witness saw a body covered with a sheet lying on the pavement outside a hall known as the Palace of Unity where a conference on disaster risk management organised by the European Commission had been due to start later in the day.

Dushanbe, a city of about one million people in the mostly Muslim former Soviet country, was at the centre of a bloody civil war in the 1990s which pitted Moscow-backed secular forces against an alliance of Islamists and opposition-minded liberals.



TERRORISM POSSIBLE

The KNB security service, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB, was investigating the case for a possible terror link, it said. Kasym Dafarov, a senior KNB official, said the explosive device was planted in a plastic bag outside the building.

"He (guard) picked it up and the bag exploded in his hands," he told reporters at the scene.

Prime Minister Akil Akilov and other senior officials had been due to make a speech at the conference. The European Commission delegation in Dushanbe said it had little reason to believe the blast was specifically aimed against it.

"It is difficult to say who was the target. I don't think it was directed against us in particular," Marc Fumagalli, European Commission Information Officer in Tajikistan, told Reuters. He said the conference would be rescheduled.

Tajikistan, an impoverished nation bordering Afghanistan, has been calm in past years as officials focused more on rebuilding the nation's ruined economy.

Its long-serving president, Imomali Rakhmon, has blamed Islamist militants for trying to destabilise the situation in a country which lies on one of the main drugs trafficking routes to Europe from Afghanistan.

Some human rights groups have accused Rakhmon of using the threat as an excuse to crack down on dissent and religious freedom in the tightly run Central Asian country. (Writing by Maria Golovnina)