|
Blasts rock Kazakh ruling party headquarters
Two powerful blasts rocked the headquarters of President Nursultan Nazarbayev's ruling Otan (Fatherland) party in Almaty's busy central district Sunday evening, a spokeswoman for the Emergencies Agency said. Reuters witnesses heard the two blasts one after another with an interval of around 5 minutes. The headquarters' building sits on a busy thoroughfare in the center of Kazakhstan's commercial capital. "As far as we know, the blasts have hit the Otan headquarters," the spokeswoman said, declining to give details. Alexander Pavlov, an Otan deputy chairman, confirmed to Reuters that the headquarters had been hit by explosions but declined to comment further.It was not immediately clear what had caused the blasts, though the area was quickly swarming with special forces and plain-clothes officers, who cordoned off the 3-storey building. In September, the Otan party and its allies won all but one of the seats in parliamentary elections that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said were marred by intimidation and fell short of democratic standards. The lone opposition deputy has since resigned to protest at what he called a rigged and falsified poll. Earlier this month, Kazakhstan said it had broken up a network of Islamic militants linked to al Qaeda who trained suicide bombers and planned a "terrorist act" against a top official in neighboring Uzbekistan. Some members of the group, calling itself Jamaat of Central Asian Mujahideen, participated in violent attacks on police and foreign embassies in Uzbekistan which claimed more than 50 lives earlier this year, the KNB security services said. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-11-29 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=49957 |