Protesters seize Kazakh president’s Almaty residence
Protesters have seized the Almaty residence of Kazakhstan’s president, the zakon.kz news portal reported on Wednesday citing eyewitnesses, TASS news agency reported.
Earlier media reports said that several thousand protesters were trying to break into the premises of the residence.
On January 2, crowds took to the streets in the cities of Zhanaozen and Aktau in the Mangystau Region, in southwestern Kazakhstan, protesting against high fuel prices. Two days later, the protests engulfed Almaty, in the country’s southeast, where the police used flashbangs to disperse the crowd, as well as other cities. The president imposed a two-week state of emergency in the Mangystau Region and in the Almaty Region, as well as the republic’s largest city of Almaty and the capital Nur-Sultan. On January 5, the head of the state also accepted the government’s resignation.