Uzbekistan on Monday said it had resumed supplies of gas to energy-starved Tajikistan after a two-week cut in deliveries heightened simmering tensions between the two ex-Soviet neighbours.

Analysts had warned that Tajikistan -- which has few energy resources of its own and imports almost all its gas from Uzbekistan -- risked seeing factories shut down if the taps were not turned back on.

Tensions have long been rumbling over Tajikistan's controversial plan to build a hydro-electric power plant which Dushanbe says is the only way to relieve chronic energy shortages, but which Tashkent says will rob Uzbek farmers of water.

Uzbekistan halted gas supplies on April 1, citing increased demand from Russia and China.

State energy company Uzbekneftegaz announced Monday that a new contract had been signed with Tajikistan's Tajiktransgaz on April 11.

"Based on the contract, supplies of gas to Tajikistan resumed as of midnight April 16 (Monday)," Uzbekneftgaz said in a statement in Tashkent.

Tajik officials in Dushanbe told AFP a contract had been concluded, but said Uzbek gas supplies had not yet arrived in the country.

"Tajikistan is expecting the gas from Uzbekistan. Procedural questions are being determined at the border before the Uzbek side opens the taps," an official from Tajiktransgaz told AFP.

Tajikistan, which has a population of 7.5 million people, is the poorest country in ex-Soviet Central Asia and purchases 95 percent of its natural gas from Uzbekistan.

The cut raised concern about the operations of Tajikistan's main industrial factories, the Tajik Aluminium Company and the Dushanbe cement plant which supplies materials to the Rogun Dam hydro-electric power project.

The Tajik Aluminium Company, the biggest aluminium producer in Central Asia, on its own consumes 25 percent of the entire volume of gas delivered to Tajikistan.

The Rogun Dam -- which is being built across the Vakhsh river 110 kilometres (70 miles) southwest of Dushanbe -- was initiated under the Soviet Union. It stalled in the 1990s, but has now been revived.

Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon has said there was no alternative to building the dam while vowing not to monopolise water resources, of which Tajikistan boasts more than any other country in the region.

"We ask our neighbours to understand Tajikistan's situation with no big energy reserves, and the sole solution is the construction of a hydro-electric power station," the president's press service quoted him as saying.

Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, both run by secular strongmen hostile to Islamic militancy, have a history of troubled relations. Their borders have not been properly demarcated and there are no air links between their capitals.

Persian-speaking Tajikistan is already looking at the possibility of purchasing gas from Iran and having it delivered in a pipeline crossing Afghanistan and bypassing Uzbekistan.

In March, Rakhmon, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a memorandum on their intention to build a gas pipeline.

"In two months in Tehran working groups from the governments on all three sides will start the detailed study and examination of this project," an Iranian diplomat told AFP in Dushanbe.