5 dead in Kazhakstan blast, shooting

Five people, including an apparent suicide bomber, were killed on Saturday in a combined shooting and bomb attack in the southern Kazakh city of Taraz, the Interfax news agency reported. An unknown individual attacked a weapons shop, stealing two Saiga rifles and killing a security guard, the interior ministry said in a statement quoted by the agency. He then escaped in a vehicle, shooting dead two police officers on his way. When finally apprehended, the gunman detonated his charge, killing himself and a traffic policeman. "After being arrested, the wounded criminal blew himself up and as a result a member of the traffic police was killed," the interior ministry said. Kazakhstan, which this month passed a new law tightening control over religious organisations, has seen an unprecedented spate of small-scale attacks over the last year blamed on Islamist extremists. The attack comes after a suspected extremist accidentally blew himself up in the western Kazakh city of Atyrau on the Caspian Sea on October 31. An Islamist group Jund al-Khilafah (Soldiers of the Caliphate) said it was behind that incident and another blast that took place on the same day in Atyrau. Kazakh prosecutors last week confirmed that the group was to blame for the Atyrau explosions and warned that its members wanted to "unleash jihad on the territory of Kazakhstan". Such unrest has until recently been highly unusual in majority Muslim but secular Kazakhstan, which under strongman leader Nursultan Nazarbayev has earned a reputation as by far the most stable country in Central Asia.