Police said on Monday they had killed nine people suspected of carrying out attacks on security forces in a remote western region of Kazakhstan and denied the attacks were part of any Islamist rebellion, Reuters reported.
Three officers have been killed in two separate gun attacks in the Aktobe region since June 30, less than two months after a suicide bomber blew himself up in the offices of the state security offices in the regional capital.
The Central Asian State's Interior Ministry said a fourth serviceman was killed on Friday when gunmen opened fire from a house in the town of Kenkiyak. Security forces stormed the building and killed the assailants after a shootout.
First Deputy Interior Minister Marat Demeuov told reporters an organised criminal group had existed for years in the region, using religious ideology as a guise for the theft of oil siphoned from a pipeline running through the region. Kenkiyak stands on a major pipeline route linking the oilfields of western Kazakhstan with a trunk pipeline to China. But the recent attacks, as well as a separate car blast in the capital Astana in May, have led to speculation that Islamist violence could spill over from neighbouring Central Asian states to Kazakhstan. The government has repeatedly denied this.
Kazakhstan, where 70 percent of the 16.4 million population are Muslim, has avoided the militant Islamist violence of the kind encountered by some of its ex-Soviet neighbours.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan for 20 years, was re-elected by a landslide in April on a platform of economic growth and stability. He prides himself on lasting peace among the many ethnic groups that call Kazakhstan home.
"Kazakhstan cannot afford to relax. The country is located in a very dangerous zone from the point of view of religious extremism, while within the country itself there are also potential flashpoints," said political analyst Dosym Satpayev.
In a separate incident on Monday, convicts killed a prison guard and wounded two servicemen in a shootout during a failed attempt to escape from a penal colony, a division of the Justice Ministry said.
The ministry's penitentiary committee said its servicemen and interior troops foiled the attempted jailbreak through the main fence of the colony in Balkhash, an industrial city about 600 km (375 miles) north of Kazakhstan's biggest city, Almaty. The Interior Ministry declined to comment on the incident.