Former Kazakh spy chief arrested
He’s detained on suspicion of treason as crisis roils country
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — The former head of Kazakhstan’s powerful intelligence agency has been arrested on suspicion of treason, officials said Saturday.
The intelligence agency, a successor to the Soviet KGB, said in a statement that Karim Masimov was arrested Thursday, a day after Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev dismissed him from his post, replacing him with the head of the president’s security detail. The agency provided no details about the government’s treason allegations.
Several other officials were also arrested, the statement said, but it did not identify them or give any further details.
Masimov has been regarded as a key ally of Kazakhstan’s former president, and the announcement came amid continued signs of infighting among the country’s political elite.
Kazakhstan, the world’s largest landlocked country, was plunged into crisis last week after protests in a remote western oil town over a fuel-price increase suddenly spread thousands of miles east to Almaty, the country’s biggest and most prosperous city.
Violence escalated in Almaty as the protests grew. Dozens of protesters and some security officers were reported to have been killed, and videos showed burned government buildings and the shells of incinerated cars. Kazakh authorities said more than 4,000 people had been detained.
At a critical point during the upheaval, Tokayev formally requested the intervention of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russia-led military alliance. Russia, along with other countries that belong to the organization, sent as many as 2,500 troops to help Kazakh authorities quell the unrest.
In a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, Tokayev expressed his “special gratitude” to Russia for its help, a Kremlin statement said.
It is difficult to assess exactly what is happening inside Kazakhstan, which has been largely sealed off from the outside world.
Its main airports are closed or commandeered by Russian troops, and internet services and phone lines are mostly down.
Tokayev moved last week to sideline Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev — who had retained wide powers as head of the country’s Security Council, an umbrella group for national security coordination, and who was given the honorary title of “people’s hero.”
At the height of the tumult Wednesday, Tokayev — whom Nazarbayev had hand-picked as his successor when he stepped down in 2019 — announced that he had replaced Nazarbayev as the head of the Security Council, leaving the former president without any formal levers of power.
After the move by Tokayev, rumors swirled that Nazarbayev had fled the country. But Nazarbayev’s spokesperson dismissed them Saturday, saying that the former leader was in the capital, Nur-Sultan, and that he was urging Kazakhs to find a way to support the president.
Nazarbayev “calls on everyone to rally around the president of Kazakhstan to overcome current challenges and ensure the integrity of the country,” spokesperson Aidos Ukibay wrote on Twitter.
The announcement Saturday that Masimov, long a Nazarbayev loyalist, is now being accused of treason added to the intrigue about the infighting and how it was playing into the unrest.
Masimov, who at one time was Nazarbayev’s chief of staff and Kazakhstan’s prime minister, has been regarded as “a mastodon of Kazakh politics,” said Daniil Kislov, a Russian expert on Central Asia who runs Fergana, a news site focused on the region.
Masimov has remained close to some of Nazarbayev’s influential family members, Kislov said.
“He has been one of the most influential people,” he said, “the ultimate power broker.”