ASTANA. May 24 (Interfax) - An explosion occurred outside the building of the National Security Committee Department in Astana in the early hours of Tuesday.
A car presumably with one or two persons inside blew up near the entrance to the building at around 3:30 a.m. local time, eyewitnesses told Interfax.
The car was a red BMW, fragments of the bodies of the people who were inside the car were scattered by the explosion wave within a radius of tens of meters, eyewitnesses said.
The explosion smashed windows in the nearby houses. Early reports suggest none of the residents was hurt.
At the moment, police and investigators working at the scene are not commenting on the incident.
By now the bodies' fragments have been removed and the street has been cleared. Technicians are repairing torn cables on the poles.
Law enforcement officers are quizzing the eyewitnesses.
This is not the first explosion outside the NSC building in Kazakhstan over the past month.
In the morning of May 17, a local resident, 25-year-old Rakhimzhan Makatov, blew himself up at the building of the NSC regional department in Aktobe, killing himself and injuring two people.
On the same day the Kazakh Prosecutor General's Office said Makatov, who was suspected of committing a number of crimes as a member of an organized criminal group, committed the suicide explosion in order to dodge responsibility. The explosion was not a terrorist attack, prosecutors said.
Meanwhile, NSC deputy chairman User Mizanbayev said the Aktobe suicide explosion bore the hallmarks of terrorism