Murray was appointed as the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, at the age of 43, where he was formally in office from August 2002 to October 2004, when he was dismissed. He told Nick Paton Walsh, then with "The Guardian", in July 2004 that "there is no point in having cocktail-party relationships with a fascist regime". In a 2005 University of York speech, Murray recounted that, about a fortnight after his arrival, he observed a court trial at which an elderly defendant said his statement about two of the other accused, nephews of his, had been made as he watched his children being tortured, and the claim the two men were associates of Osama Bin Laden was entirely false.