Burned car outside the residence of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Alma-AtaVIENNA, Jan 19 Kazakh Vice -Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tleuberdi said, based on the testimony of his friends, ambassadors and doctors, that many among the armed attackers during the protests in Kazakhstan did not speak either Kazakh or Russian, but «other Asian languages.» Kazakh President Kassym- Zhomart Tokayev on January 7, in connection with the riots in the country, ordered law enforcement agencies and the army to open fire to kill without warning.Kazakhstan was forced to resort to outside help, Tokayev said. «As for terrorist organizations, firstly, we believe that they belong to Islamist radical groups. Many of my friends who live in Alma-Ata, as well as our ambassadors who became eyewitnesses there, called me and reported that among the armed attackers there were many who spoke Kazakh with a strong accent, which shows that they were not native speakers.Some of the wounded among them were in hospitals and doctors said that they were not they spoke neither Kazakh nor Russian. That is, they spoke other Asian languages,» he said at a press conference after a meeting in Vienna with his Austrian counterpart Alexander Schallenberg. The minister did not specify which of the many Asian languages he could speak of. Tleuberdi also said that the attackers also acted as «Islamist radicals», recalling that two police officers were beheaded, that they «attacked the morgues and took 41 bodies of the attackers.» «This shows that they acted as radical extremists, they did not want the bodies to be identified,» he added. questions from doctors in Kazakh or Russian, left medical organizations without permission.Nazarbayev said he never left the capital of Kazakhstan Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev tweeted on January 7 that some militants in Kazakhstan spoke a language other than Kazakh (the post was later deleted). After that, Rustam Abdrakhmanov, deputy head of the Alma-Ata police department, posted on his Facebook page a video of the interrogation of a suspect who claimed that the participants in the assault on the police department “spoke only in their own language, talked about martyrs and started shooting with shouts of “Allah Akbar.” protests in Kazakhstan began in the first days of 2022 — residents of the cities of Zhanaozen and Aktau in the west of the country opposed the doubling of prices for liquefied gas. Later, the protests spread to other cities, including Alma-Ata, the old capital and the largest city of the republic: looting began there, militants attacked state institutions, took away weapons. In response, the authorities declared a state of emergency throughout the country until January 19 and launched a counter-terrorism operation. According to the UN, during the protests in Kazakhstan, about 1,000 people were injured. According to the country's Prosecutor General's Office, 4,578 people were injured as a result of the riots, 225 people died, including 19 security officials.
