Kazakhstan detains extremists

Kazakh security forces have detained a group of extremists who had planned “acts of terror” in the Central Asian nation’s oil-producing region of Atyrau, local prosecutors and media said on Wednesday.

“During the detention, one of the members of this gang put up staunch resistance and was destroyed. An investigation is under way,” the prosecutor’s office of Atyrau in western Kazakhstan said on its website.

“To date, 18 people have been detained on suspicion of planning terrorist attacks,” Interfax news agency quoted Atyrau Prosecutor Sayfulla Kamalov as telling a news briefing.  

He said the detainees were all men living in the region who had also planned attacks in other parts of the country.  

Kamalov said that components of an explosive device, religious literature and firearms had been found at the house of the man who had been shot dead.  

Six of those detained had been arrested and charged with terrorism, he said. He gave no further details.  

Kazakhstan, where 70% of the 16.5-million population are Muslim, has so far avoided the militant Islamist violence that has hit its ex-Soviet neighbours in Central Asia, a region that borders Afghanistan.  

But a recent series of unexplained explosions and shootouts with well-armed gunmen in various parts of the country have unnerved the authorities of Kazakhstan, run by strongman President Nursultan Nazarbayev for more than 20 years.  

Earlier this month, Kazakhstan temporarily blocked access to a number of foreign Internet sites, including the popular blogging space LiveJournal, after a court ruled they were propagating terrorism and inciting religious hatred.