Rustam Ibragimov, a former officer of Kazakhstan’s elite regulation enforcement unit who’s serving life in jail for the kidnapping and homicide of opposition chief Altynbek Sarsenbaiuly and two associates 18 years in the past, has requested for a retrial, insisting that he was not concerned within the high-profile assassination.
Ibragimov’s lawyer, Bolat Omarov, instructed RFE/RL on February 12 that his shopper supplied particulars of a letter he wrote to President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev asking that his case be retried in an interview with the Zlobnaya Tateshka group.
Ibragimov, who initially pleaded responsible to organizing the kidnapping and killing of Sarsenbaiuly and his two associates in February 2006, now says that Rakhat Aliev, the late former son-in-law of Kazakh ex-President Nursultan Nazarbaev, the previous chief of the Committee for Nationwide Safety, Alnur Musaev, and an ex-employee of Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor-Basic’s Workplace organized the kidnapping and assassination.
Ibragimov additional asserted within the interview that former Prosecutor-Basic Rashid Tusupbekov, former Inside Minister Bauyrzhan Mukhamedzhanov, his ex-deputy Qalmukhambet Qasymov, and different former officers ”helped actual criminals to keep away from punishment, whereas harmless folks had been imprisoned.”
Neither Mukhamedzhanov nor Musaev was obtainable for remark, whereas Qasymov and former chief investigator of the Inside Ministry, Gashi Mashanlo, refused to remark to RFE/RL on Ibragimov’s letter and assertion. Tusupbekov’s whereabouts are unknown.
The developments come lower than one month after Kazakh authorities unexpectedly allowed an occasion commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the start of the late opposition politician Zamanbek Nurqadilov, an outspoken critic of Nazarbaev.
On January 14, a particular letter from Toqaev praising Nurqadilov’s contribution to Kazakh statehood was learn on the ceremony to commemorate him. The occasion was uncommon as a result of, since Nurqadilov’s loss of life, any public point out of the politician’s identify and his obvious assassination had been taboo.
Nurqadilov was mayor of Almaty and chairman of the Emergency Conditions Company earlier than he changed into a fierce critic of Nazarbaev and his authorities in 2004. He was discovered useless with two bullets in his chest and one in his head at his house in Almaty. Official investigators dominated that the loss of life was a suicide, sparking a public outcry on the time.
Three months later Sarsenbaiuly and his associates — driver Vasily Zhuravlyov, and assistant Bauyrzhan Baibosyn — had been assassinated. The killings had been formally declared to have been motivated by private enmity.
One other defendant within the Sarsenbaiuly case, former chief of employees of the Kazakh parliament Erzhan Otembaev, was convicted of ordering the slaying and sentenced to twenty years in jail. Nonetheless, in 2013, Otembaev’s sentence was annulled after Kazakh authorities introduced that the case had been despatched for assessment primarily based on newly obtained proof, which they mentioned indicated that Aliev had ordered the killing.
Aliev, who was deputy chief of Kazakhstan’s Nationwide Safety Committee when the slayings befell and later turned an outspoken opponent of his former father-in-law, was in self-imposed exile in Europe on the time.
He was later arrested by Austrian officers on the request of authorities in Kazakhstan who accused him of involvement within the kidnapping and homicide of two Kazakh bankers.
In February 2015, Aliev was discovered hanged in a Vienna jail.
Austrian officers dominated that Aliev’s loss of life was a suicide, however many in Kazakhstan imagine he was murdered whereas in Austrian custody.