In total, 970 people accused of theft, public disorder or illegal possession of weapons were arrested as part of the investigations opened after this violence.
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The Kazakh authorities announced on Saturday January 22 that they had arrested more than 450 people for terrorism and mass unrest, after the deadly riots that shook this Central Asian country. In early January, unprecedented demonstrations against an increase in energy prices had turned into a vast challenge to power, punctuated by violence and harshly repressed by the executive. These clashes left 225 dead, hundreds injured and prompted President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to request the deployment of Russian armed forces and their allies to restore order. More than 2,000 soldiers were thus dispatched to Kazakhstan to support the authorities, before withdrawing on January 19, once their mission was accomplished.
According to a senior Kazakh prosecutor’s official, 464 suspects were arrested on charges of terrorism and mass unrest following the riots. A total of 970 people accused of theft, public disorder or illegal possession of weapons have been arrested as part of the investigations opened after the violence, he said.
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev accused “terrorists” trained according to him abroad to be behind the violence, without however providing evidence. The Kazakh president succeeded in 2019 to his mentor, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who reigned with an iron fist for three decades over the largest country in Central Asia (19 million inhabitants).
The bloody crisis in January, however, brought to light the internal struggle at the top of power. In an unprecedented way, the new president attacked his predecessor at the beginning of January, accusing him of having favored the emergence of a “rich caste” dominating this state abounding in hydrocarbons. The influential “Head of the Nation”, Nursultan Nazarbayev, spoke on Tuesday for the first time since the beginning of the crisis to pledge allegiance to the current president and ensure that there was no “no conflict or confrontation within the elite”. Several of the relatives of the former president have however been dismissed in recent days from key positions, and others have been imprisoned.