The situation in Kazakhstan is now under control, the country’s National Security Committee said today, while the Interior Ministry said nearly 8,000 people had been arrested during last week’s riots, the worst in the history of the former Soviet republic since its independence.
The “core of terrorist threats” have been neutralized, the National Security Committee said in a statement.
“On January 10, 7,989 people are being held by the Interior Ministry,” the ministry said in a post on the government website.
Karim Massimov, a former head of the powerful service, was ousted last week by President Kasim-Yomart Tokayev and has been arrested on suspicion of treason.
Tokayev has stopped the government, allowed security forces to fire on protesters without warning, and declared a state of 19 million people in an oil-rich state of emergency. He also called on the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to send troops to Kazakhstan to guard strategic facilities.
“I believe that there was some kind of conspiracy in which some domestic and foreign destructive forces were involved,” Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Guerlain Karin told state television today, without naming any specifics.
Protests in Kazakhstan began a week ago in protest of rising fuel prices, before escalating into a wider protest against the government of President Tokayev and his predecessor, 81-year-old Nursultan Nazarbayev. This is the deadliest outbreak of violence in the 30 years of Kazakhstan’s independence.
Russian and local media reported today that 164 people were killed during the riots, citing a government post on social media, but police and hospital authorities have not confirmed that number. The post has now been deleted. Today has been declared a day of national mourning.
Internet access was restored today in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, a French Agency correspondent found.
In the economic capital of the Central Asian country, a city with a population of about 1.8 million, access to domestic and international websites was again possible. Life gradually returned to normal early in the morning, with public transport reopening, for the first time since the outbreak of the violence.
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