Moscow police detain international terror group member

Russian police had detained a member of the international terrorist group Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party), the Interior Ministry said Thursday. A 25-year-old man from the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan was detained here after distributing leaflets with extremist content and trying to recruit members, the ministry said in a statement. The suspect had been deported a few years ago for violating Russian laws, the ministry said, adding he later forged ID documents and returned to Russia to continue criminal activities. The ministry's counter-extremism department earlier also detained a Kyrgyz man in a historic mosque in Moscow, where he was also trying to recruit people for the same group during Friday prayers, local police said. The extremist group, believed to have been established in the Palestine territories in 1953, calls for replacing national governments with a universal caliphate. It has been banned in several Central Asian countries. Russia's Supreme Court listed it as an extremist group in 2003.