The account comes from a relative who asked not to be named and from a colleague, published by the BBC's Uzbek service and carried on Thursday by Fergana, Asia-Plus and Vlast. Several men in plain clothes came to the family's home in Astana, said the professor was suspected of espionage and took him away. During the arrest, the family says, they hinted at his contacts with an employee of Uzbekistan's consulate in the city.
Article 176 covers gathering, passing, stealing or holding state secrets for a foreign state or organisation. It carries 10 to 15 years. Nobody has named a country. Nothing in the public record says which state the investigators believe he served, or what secrets a professor of regionalism is supposed to have held.
His subject is the one both governments have spent a year turning into policy. In April 2025 he finished a comparative study of the legal, political and strategic narratives around critical minerals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, still unpublished. It works through 9 Kazakh, 8 Uzbek and 3 international documents, all of them public, according to the colleague. In November 2025 Astana and Tashkent agreed a joint working group on rare and rare-earth metals; it met for the first time in Astana in April.
Qoraboyev, 46, trained in Tashkent, Montpellier and Toulouse, taught in France before moving to Astana, directs the university's Center for Global and Regional Governance and holds a research fellowship at the United Nations University's institute for regional integration in Bruges. His published work is about how Eurasian regionalism gets built. The colleague, who has known him for more than a decade, says people in that line of work are used to the attention of security services: they meet diplomats, often off the record.
Nothing in the public record says which state the investigators believe he served, or what secrets a professor of regionalism is supposed to have held.
The lawyer question is where the case turns from opaque to procedural. A state-appointed lawyer came once. A lawyer hired by the family cannot get in: a case involving state secrets needs clearance from the National Security Committee, and the family says the committee has put the decision off week after week. Letters to the committee, the prosecutor-general and the interior ministry have drawn no reply.
The university told a colleague that the professor "resigned in the summer". His page is still up. Requests from the BBC to Uzbekistan's prosecutor-general, its interior and foreign ministries and the consulate in Astana went unanswered. In Bruges the UN institute said it was concerned and issued no statement.
Nearly 8 weeks of silence is a choice in itself. Two governments that have just built a joint body for the minerals the outside powers are competing over now have a scholar of those minerals in custody, and neither has found it necessary to explain.