A six-month trial in Uzbekistan over the deaths of at least 68 children linked to contaminated cough syrup imported from India has ended with several of the accused receiving lengthy sentences. 

A Tashkent court on February 26 found 23 people guilty of a range of crimes, from bribery and malpractice to abuse of power, tax evasion and the production and sale of substandard medicines. 

The stiffest sentence, 20 years in prison, was handed down to Raghvendra Pratar Singh, the head of Quramax Medikal, the company that imported the drugs produced by India’s Marion Biotech. During the trial, the Indian national confessed to paying a $33,000 bribe to Uzbek officials to avoid an audit of Marion Biotech products.

Sardor Kariyev, the former director of the Pharmaceutical Industry Development Agency, a state regulator, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. His two former deputies got 16 years in prison apiece. 

Shoyusuf Shodmanov, who was responsible for the state registration of drugs, has been ordered to spend 16-and-a-half years in prison. 

Other defendants received relatively more lenient treatment – from correctional labour to restricted liberty. Overall, there were 18 men and five women in the dock.

The court has also ordered seven of the people on trial, including Singh and Kariyev, to pay 75.6bn Uzbek som (about $605,000) in compensation to the families of children who died or were adversely affected after taking the tainted cough syrup. 

Officials found guilty of receiving bribes from Quramax Medikal will have to return money to the state. 

According to an official account, the Indian-made cough syrup, DOK-1 Max, killed dozens of children in the period from December 2022 to January 2023. Most of the victims were under three years-old. 

One of the convicted officials admitted the regulator had not conducted tests on DOK-1 Max before registering it. The laboratory testing would later show the syrup contained amounts of the industrial compounds diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol more than 300 times above the norm allowed for by medical standards. 

This article first appeared on Eurasianet here.