ASTANA. May 19 (Interfax) - The Prosecutor General's Office of Kazakhstan may bring charges of murder against Rakhat Aliyev, if his involvement in the murder of Nurbank top executives is proved, Deputy Prosecutor General Iogan Merkel has said.
"We will now clarify everything, and if it [involvement in the murder] is proved, corresponding charges will be brought," he said to reporters in Astana on Wednesday.
Aliyev, who used to be the Kazakh ambassador to Austria and the son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev until 2007, was sentenced in 2008 for a total of 40 years in jail on charges of committing several felonies such as high treason, planning a coup and the abduction of top managers of Nurbank, Zholdas Timraliyev and Aibar Khasenov, whose bodies were discovered only on May 13 of this year.
The sentence was brought in absentia because Aliyev has been hiding abroad since spring 2007, and the Austrian side has refused to extradite him to Kazakhstan.
Timraliyev and Khasenov were abducted from the head office of their bank in Almaty on January 31, 2007, by a group hired by Aliyev, who was the actual owner of the bank at that time. Investigators established that the bankers had been held in captivity, tortured and humiliated for several days. There had been no detailed information about what happened to them later, which is why the key suspects remained at large and continued to hide abroad.