Five suspected militants and two security officers were killed in a shootout near Kazakhstan's commercial capital Almaty, prosecutors said on Sunday, in the latest of a series of attacks in the oil-producing Central Asian state. The five gunmen barricaded themselves in a house in the village of Boraldai outside Almaty late on Saturday after fatally wounding two security officers, prosecutors said.
"After they refused to surrender voluntarily and put up staunch armed resistance, the five members of the terrorist group, including their leader, were destroyed," the prosecutor-general's office said in a statement.
A string of blasts and shootouts have fractured Kazakhstan's image of stability this year. The long-peaceful, mainly Muslim nation had not until this year seen the outbursts of militancy seen in other parts of the vast region north of Afghanistan. In the latest case, prosecutors did not say if the militants belonged to any wider extremist network. Law-enforcement bodies could not be immediately reached for further details.
The statement only said the group was led by a 34-year-old man and was responsible for the murder of two policemen in Almaty last month, it said.
"The group's members had been planning to carry out new acts of violence in Almaty," the statement said.