A former minister in the government of Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev who had said he would speak publicly about high-level corruption was found shot to death here on Saturday night, according to the police and an opposition leader.
The killing comes three weeks before a presidential election in this oil-rich former Soviet state.
The victim, Zamanbek Nurkadilov, 61, was a member of the leading opposition group, For a Fair Kazakhstan. He was fired from his post as minister of emergency situations last year after saying that Nazarbayev should answer allegations that Kazakh officials had accepted millions of dollars in bribes from an intermediary for US oil companies during contract talks in the 1990s.
Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, the leading opposition candidate in the presidential race, said in an interview on Sunday that Nurkadilov had recently said he would go public with information about corruption in Nazarbayev's government. He did not say what information Nurkadilov had planned to disclose.
According to news reports and opposition leaders, Nurkadilov had said after he was fired that he had documents proving corruption in the Kazakh government.
Nurkadilov's wife found his body on Saturday evening, said Sirkali Musin, a lawyer for the family. Nurkadilov was sprawled on the floor of a billiard room, said Musin, in the couple's beige brick compound overlooking Almaty, the financial capital.
Nurkadilov was shot twice in the chest and once in the head, Musin said, adding that the police had recovered a pillow pierced by bullets that may have been used as a silencer.
The police said they had found no signs of a forced entry and that Nurkadilov had been shot with his own pistol.
Moldiar Orazaliyev, the police chief of Almaty, said the police were investigating the killing but had ruled out a political motive.
"We don't have that version," he told reporters at a news conference on Sunday.
Nazarbayev expressed his condolences to the family and called for a thorough investigation, AFP reported.
The Dec. 4 election, coming a year after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine toppled another entrenched former Soviet ruler, is being closely watched, although Western diplomats and analysts say Kazakhstan lacks the ingredients for a similar uprising.
Nazarbayev's popularity has been buoyed by rising standards of living from oil revenues. Tuyakbai of the For a Fair Kazakhstan Party trails the president by close to 50 percentage points in official polls.
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