Kazakh Prosecutor: 'Well Aware' Of Identities Of Child Militants In IS Video

Kazakh Prosecutor: 'Well Aware' Of Identities Of Child Militants In IS Video. (RFELR).

Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prosecutor-General Andrey Kravchenko has said that the country’s intelligence and law-enforcement services have identified the Kazakh children shown in a recent Islamic State group video, RFE/RL’s Kazakh service reports.

The video, which Islamic State released in November, shows a group of Kazakh nationals, including children, undergoing military and ideological training. Titled “Race Toward Good,” the video caused an outcry in Kazakhstan. The Prosecutor-General’s Office said it was taking legal steps to prohibit its distribution and deem it illegal.

Speaking on the sidelines of a conference in Astana on combating religious extremism and terrorism on December 19, Kravchenko said that the Kazakh authorities were “well aware who these children are” and that Astana would “continue our work so that these children are not implicated in any criminal activities.”

Kravchenko said that while he was not able to disclose names, the children “reached [Syria] in various ways and in the main these are children who went their with their families.”

Kravchenko said that Kazakhstan is interacting with Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to prevent the spread of such video clips via the Internet.

“We find that the staff of these services have an understanding of our work and they are coming to us for a meeting,” Kravchenko said, adding that Kazakhstan has now blocked around 500 websites.

The ban by Kazakhstan of the “Race Toward Good” video appears to have also affected news outlets in neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

In November, a Kyrgyz news portal, Kloop.kg, said that the Kyrgyz Interior Ministry had asked the site to remove a report it posted about the video. The site’s editor, Bektur Iskender, said that Bishkek was punishing Kyrgyz citizens in order to appease Kazakhstan.

On December 16, Kloop.kg’s owners reported that their site had been blocked in Kyrgyzstan after they refused to take down the report on the Islamic State video. -- Joanna Paraszczuk. Read the full story here.

Video - Russian Proton-M rocket crashes on takeoff.

Video - Russian Proton-M rocket crashes on takeoff . HT: Russia Today.

A Russian Proton-M rocket carrying three navigation satellites crashed soon after takeoff from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome Tuesday morning. Immediately after takeoff, the rocket swerved to one side, tried to correct itself, but instead veered in the opposite direction. The rocket flew horizontally before plummeting back to the launch site, with its engines in full thrust. There are no immediate reports of casualties.
 The emergency ministry of Kazakhstan is considering evacuating the surrounding areas as nuclear fuel which leaked from the rocket could pose a threat to the surrounding area. Experts point to engine failure as the likely cause of the crash. "It's either the control system or the engine that has caused the accident. If the accident occurred in the first 10 to 20 seconds, than the engine is likely to be the cause," a source in the space agency told RIA.Read and see the full story here.

Kazakhstan - White camel Sacrificed to End Suicides on Imams advice.

Kazakhstan - White camel Sacrificed to end Suicides on Imams advice.(RN).Locals in a town in southern Kazakhstan sacrificed a white camel in a bid to end a suicide epidemic blamed on an evil spirit, regional Otyrar television reported. Some 200 residents of the town of Karabulak, which has a population of some 40,000, attended the sacrifice ceremony, the channel said on Thursday. The white camel was slaughtered on advice from the village elders some time after two middle school students hung themselves, the report said. Three more teenagers were recently prevented from committing suicide at the last moment, and dozens more sought help of the imams of the local mosque, the report said. The total death toll from suicides in 2011 in the town stood at 14, most of them adolescent boys. The surviving boys said they saw a vision of an old man clad in white who told them life is pointless and showed them a rope around his neck, imam Abdurrafi Rakhmatullayev said. “That was the Devil in human guise,” Rakhmatullayev said. A similar incident took place in Karabulak 60 years ago, but the suicides were ended after one of the elders, or aqsaqals, advised a white camel sacrifice, town head Alimzhan Nishankulov said. In the 1950s, Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union, but Nishankulov did not elaborate on what the Communist Party, notorious for its militant atheism, said about the ritual. No suicide attempts were reported in Karabulak after this week’s sacrifice.Hmmmm.......The Devil is a white camel?Read the full story here.

Blasphemous Vodka Brand Pulled in Kazakhstan.

Blasphemous Vodka Brand Pulled in Kazakhstan.(RN).Imams fumed and believers rallied this week in Kazakhstan, where a brand of vodka praising the might of Allah went on sale in the country’s east, local media reported on Thursday. The plastic wrapping on the neck of the Baiterek vodka contained the phrase roughly translated as “the might of Allah suffices for everyone” in Arabic script amid flowery ornaments, KTK television said. The vodka, priced at 650 tenge ($4.3) per bottle, appeared in the city of Semey, some 600 kilometers east from the capital Almaty, Tengrinews.kz said. Several dozen devout Muslims staged a protest rally in the city of Aktobe, while the country’s Islamic clergy lambasted the unholy produce in an online appeal, which pointed out that Allah banned believers from consumption of alcohol. The manufacturer, Geom, blamed its Russian partners, saying the wrapping was designed by an unspecified Russian firm, KTK said. The firm mistook the Arabic script for an ethnic Kazakh design, Geom’s director said, Tengrinews.kz reported. The company issued an official apology and pulled the blasphemous beverage off the shelves, the report said. Islam is the dominant religion in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian nation of 16 millions, but the country adopted a relaxed stance on religion after decades under Soviet rule. However, it experienced the first violent attacks by Islamic radicals in its history last fall, indicating a rise in religious sentiment.Read the full story here.

The 'price for protest' in Kazakhstan: A Video the World Needs to See...And Understand

Yesterday a video from the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan was released on-line. It shows security forces in Zhanaozen advancing against protesters, shooting them, and then beating and stomping on their bodies. The footage confirms earlier reports that a protest by oil workers on Friday, the Kazakhstan day of national independence, had climaxed in violence, with the death of 15 demonstrators and upwards of 100 wounded. Activists claim both figures are much higher, suggesting as many as 55 deaths.
The footage, seemingly shot by two women from the window of a high-rise apartment block, captures the moment that a wave of police fire on unarmed demonstrators, clearly fleeing for their lives. A man, who appears to have collapsed after being shot in the leg, is viciously attacked by a policeman with a baton. As one of the women filming comments, "Look at them, they are just beating them to death." The police continue to advance, hitting the fallen protesters as they pass them, before converging in a group, perhaps to take stock of their carnage.
Before the emergence of this video, accounts by Western media of the events in Zhanaozen strove to bracket the protests in a familiar narrative.Source.

Kazakh opposition leaders are calling for an end to state violence and an independent commission to investigate the brutal crackdown in the Caspian oil town of Zhanaozen, where security forces have shot dead dozens of protesters.(Stratrisks).The town of Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan has been cut off from the rest of the world since last Friday, when riot police and the military started shooting striking oil workers.“The first six bodies were buried yesterday, while 60 families held prayer services for their dead relatives, even though the bodies still haven’t been handed over to them,” Ainur Kurmanov, a co-chair of the Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan, told a news conference in Moscow on Wednesday. “They know for sure they are dead.”Kazakh trade unions and socialist organizations report at least 70 people killed and over 100 missing, citing their members in the region. Authorities have put the death toll at 16.Yesenbek Ukteshbayev, a leader of the Zhanartu trade union, told the press conference of a doctor in a local hospital, who herself “closed the eyes of 23 [dead] people.”Over 300 have been arrested, according to the trade unions. Some say they saw their friends taken away or killed, but their names are missing from official records of those dead and injured.“Screams and groans are repeatedly heard from the local detention center,” Kurmanov said. “Yesterday they were seen taking out several rolled carpets from there. In the Muslim tradition, bodies are rolled in carpets.”According to Ukteshbayev, relatives of those kept in the detention center say they were driven out into the freezing yard naked and doused with cold water from hoses.“Only the fascists used such methods,” said Ukteshbayev.In Aktau, the regional capital, Kenzhegali Suyeyev, the head of a trade union commission investigating the tragedy, said people in Zhanaozen were shocked at the violence used by state forces, and had no reaction to the government’s offer of jobs in different regions.“Men have been beaten up and arrested… What reaction can there be when people are shot with assault rifles, and those wounded are finished off?Even the Germans didn’t do that,” Suyeyev told The Moscow News by telephone. “People are shocked – they can’t believe they live in a democracy. These are workers, children, women that died – they were unarmed, you understand?”A Novaya Gazeta correspondent who managed to get into Zhanaozen reported that at least 64 bodies turned up in the town’s morgue on Dec. 16-17.Korkel, a woman who was visiting her sister in Zhanaozen and went to the local hospital to help there, told correspondent Yelena Kostyuchenko: “There was no cold water in the morgue to wash the bodies. I started to count the bodies. They were put in a pile, one on top of another.Twenty-one bodies were brought there on the 16th. At 9pm Tamila, who works there, closed it, and I went home. But more bodies continued to be brought. By 9am on Dec. 17th another 43 were brought.”The Kazakh service of Radio Liberty, Radio Azattyk, managed to reach several Zhanaozen residents on the phone.“Last night my brother went to a drugstore, and police beat him up and took him away from there. They took his money and phone,” said one resident, called Gulbarshyn. “Some can’t even find their kids. Many parents are standing in front of the police station. But they won’t show them their kids. Please tell the world what we’re saying.”Another resident, Aigul Zhalgasbayeva, told Radio Azattyk: “We can’t go outside, can’t even go to work. We eat what we have [at home]. Riot police are taking the guys somewhere. We don’t know what’s going on with them.”Read the full story here.More here.