A school principal in Kashkadarya province who took a $500 bribe from a student seeking employment has been sentenced to five years in prison.
According to the case file, 62-year-old F.G. was appointed acting principal of a general secondary school in Mirishkor district on February 26, 2026. In this role, he had the authority to hire school staff and terminate their employment contracts.
On April 22, A.Kh., a fourth-year physics student at Karshi State University who was about to graduate, went looking for work and approached several schools. After finding no openings anywhere else, she went to try the school F.G. ran.
"Everywhere I went, they turned me down, saying there were no vacancies. Only F.G. said there was a position and that he could hire me as a physics teacher — but he wanted $500 for it. When I told him I needed time to think and didn't have that kind of money, he said: 'Don't worry about it, dear — just find it somehow, and I'll make sure your job is settled,'" the victim said in her testimony.
A.Kh. then recorded her conversation with the principal on her phone and reported the matter to law enforcement.
A day later, after telling the principal she agreed to his terms, she submitted a job application. F.G. asked whether she'd brought the agreed sum. She said she hadn't been able to get dollars, but had brought 6 million soums instead.
The principal took the money, and as he was walking her out, a man identified himself as a department official and asked him to step back inside to clarify the situation. F.G. initially agreed — then gave the official the slip and bolted for the school's main gate. He tossed the cash into some bushes and tried to scale the school wall to escape, but after about 200 meters he stumbled, fell, and was caught by the operational team.
The Mirishkor District Criminal Court found F.G. guilty under Article 210, Part 2, Clause "c" of the Criminal Code (Bribe-taking) and sentenced him to five years in prison. He was also barred for two years from holding official positions at state-affiliated enterprises, organizations, or institutions.
Earlier, a school principal in Surkhandarya was sentenced to four years for taking a 2 million soum bribe from his deputy.
Set against how the same justice system has handled other, far graver cases, this sentence starts to look less like proportionate justice and more like a system whose priorities are badly out of order. In a fraudulent-export scheme worth tens of billions of soums, eighteen defendants received suspended sentences with three-year probation and a repayment order, while only fourteen co-defendants got actual prison time — meaning roughly half the people convicted in that fraud walked free without serving a day, for a crime involving vastly more money than a $500 bribe.
In a 2022 Tashkent case, a physical education teacher lured a 14-year-old student to a rented apartment, where he and two friends coerced her into sex; prosecutors chose not to pursue gang-rape charges, instead filing under the statute for "voluntary" sexual relations with a minor — the teacher got four years, his accomplices two each, one year less than F.G. just received for a bribe.
While, driving another person to suicide, arguably one of the gravest harms imaginable, carries under current law nothing more than correctional labor, restricted freedom, or a prison term capped at five years — the same ceiling applied here.
A bribe-taking director gets locked up for five years, while men who assaulted a child, or officials who siphoned off billions in public funds, routinely walk with lighter terms or no prison time at all. The disparity is hard to read as anything but a criminal justice system that has lost its sense of proportion — one that comes down hardest on the crimes easiest to prosecute, while treating far more serious harms as afterthoughts.
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