DUSHANBE, June 14, 2016, Asia-Plus – Kazakh Interior Minister Kalmukhanbet Kassymov said on June 14 that investigators believe instructions for the Aktobe attacks were issued from Syria.
Authorities announced the conclusion of the anti-terrorist operation on June 12 after detaining the last suspected attacker.
Nurgali Bilisbekov, the deputy head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (NSC), explained in a post-operation briefing that the armed group appeared intent to capturing government buildings.
“According to preliminary days, after seizing the firearms, the terrorists intended to attack penitentiaries and administrative buildings,” Bilisbekov said.
Bilisbekov said only timely reaction from Special Forces troops prevented the plan from being fulfilled.
Kassymov said, “The total number of people involved in the attack, as it has been accurately established, is 45 people. But when they declared jihad and left their flats, 19 of them backed out. We have identified them all now and are interrogating them.”
Meanwhile, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said on June 8 that armed attacks in the city of Aktobe had been orchestrated from abroad and pledged to use the toughest measures to “suppress extremists and terrorists.”
The attacks were a terrorist act organized by supporters of radical, pseudo-religious teachings who were instructed from abroad, Nazarbayev said in an address to the nation published by his press service.
We will recall that suspected Islamist militants killed six people at a National Guard base and two stores selling firearms in the Kazakh industrial city of Aktobe on June 5.
Police suspected the attackers were “followers of radical, non-traditional religious movements.”
In near simultaneous attacks, the gunmen reportedly killed a clerk and a guard at one firearms store and then wounded three policemen who arrived at the site. At another firearms store, they killed a visitor before police arrived and killed three attackers. A third group hijacked a bus and used it to ram the gate at the National Guard base where they killed three servicemen before guards and police killed one attacker.
Aktobe, 100 kilometers from the Russian border, was the site of Kazakhstan”s first suicide bombing in 2011 when a local man detonated an explosive device inside the building of the state security service.
