Tajikistan will pardon 10,000 prisoners as the ex-Soviet state marks two decades of its constitution, the presidency said Monday. 

President Emomali Rakhmon has submitted to parliament a draft law on the amnesty plan, proposing to release women, minors and foreigners, as well as those who have served at least three quarters of their jail terms.

Police in Tajikistan have arrested 20 alleged Islamists for plotting to blow up two key road tunnels in the central Asian country, officials said Saturday.

"The Islamists wanted to blow up the strategic tunnels" which link the center to the north of the impoverished ex-Soviet republic, an interior ministry spokesman told Agence France-Presse.

Tajikistan's top Muslim cleric has issued a fatwa against criticizing the isolated ex-Soviet country's hardline regime, telling reporters Saturday it would be considered a "great sin."

"The Islamic center of Tajikistan has passed a new special fatwa according to which criticism of the ruling powers will be judged a 'great sin'," said chief mufti Saidmukarram Abdulkodirzoda.

The rotors of attack helicopters and artillery fire echo across the Kunduz plain in northern Afghanistan. 

A Kyrgyz border guard received head injuries on Thursday following clashes near a disputed border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that Bishkek blamed on Tajiks attempting to divert water from a river.

Kyrgyzstan's border service said in a statement that its guards came across several Tajiks building an unauthorized water pipeline in the latest incident in the tense Fergana valley region, which is uneasily shared by the Central Asian countries amid increasing water shortages.

Six children were killed when a mud slide engulfed houses in a mountain village in Tajikistan, and at least seven others are missing, a government spokesman said Sunday.

Orif Nozimov said emergency workers had pulled the children's bodies from the mud and were still searching for seven other people thought to have been in the houses when they were buried on Saturday.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has sent troops into several neighboring states that it considers as its sphere of influence, including a brief 2008 war with Georgia and an ongoing deployment in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniestr.

Russia views these military actions as peacekeeping operations.

A Tajik prisoner stabbed a prison governor to death with scissors after being ordered to give him a haircut, the interior ministry said Monday.

The 66-year-old prison governor "on Sunday evening asked the prisoner, who had worked as a hairdresser before being jailed, to come to his office to cut his hair," an interior ministry spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Tajikistan's long-running President Emomali Rakhmon was inaugurated for a fourth term on Saturday, as he promised to alleviate the grinding poverty in the former Soviet country.

Rakhmon, who has led Tajikistan since 1992, won November 6 polls with a landslide victory of 84 percent against a field of virtually unknown candidates, extending his presidency by seven years.

Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmon on Thursday secured a fourth term at the helm of the poorest state in the former Soviet Union after crushing his also-ran opponents in polls damned by the OSCE as lacking any real choice.

Rakhmon won 83.6 percent in Wednesday's elections against five barely oppositional candidates, full results showed, an improvement even on his performance in the 2006 polls when he won 79.3 percent.