18 July: a police officer conducts crowd control after an exchange of fire in the centre of Almaty. (c) Anatoly Ustinenko / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.
When a gunman killed five people in central Almaty on 18 July, his shots reverberated far beyond the leafy boulevards of Kazakhstan’s southern capital. This shooting is the second violent episode perpetrated across Kazakhstan in the past six weeks: on 5 June, a series of coordinated attacks left 19 people dead (including 12 gunmen) and 37 injured on the streets of Aktobe, the administrative centre of one of Kazakhstan’s western regions.
