The noose has tightened...

On the morning of February 24, 52-year-old Rakhat Aliyev, the former son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, was found hanged in a solitary cell in a Vienna prison.
The Austrian authorities reported that Aliyev hanged himself and no traces of violence by third parties were found. This is confirmed by video surveillance and post-mortem examination data. However, Aliyev's lawyers do not believe that their client voluntarily climbed into a noose made of gauze bandage and hung from a towel hook. They claim that he had no grounds for suicide - a few days before that, Aliyev ordered new glasses for himself and made an appointment with the prison hairdresser.

Lawyers can be understood - they have lost an incredibly generous client. Rakhat Aliyev, who was once a powerful security official in his country, who was considered almost a possible successor to his father-in-law, paid them fees of hundreds of thousands of euros for assistance in trying to escape from the justice of several European countries at once. A former deputy head of Kazakhstan's national security committee and ambassador to Austria, Aliyev was accused in his country in 2008 of attempting a coup d'état and sentenced in absentia to 40 years in prison. In Austria, he initially managed to obtain a residence permit thanks to his marriage to a former employee of his embassy, ​​whose last name - Shoraz - he took for himself, as well as the help of lawyer Wolfgang Brandstetter, now the Minister of Justice of Austria. But a few years later it became dangerous for Aliyev to stay there. He was hiding in Malta, Cyprus, Greece...

At the suit of the former guards of the ex-premier of Kazakhstan Akezhan Kazhegeldin, in the torture of which he personally participated, trying to beat them out of evidence against his boss, a criminal case was initiated against Aliyev. The evidence of his guilt was obvious and the decision of the Austrian jury looked inevitable: 5 years in prison.

In addition, another case was initiated against Aliyev - on charges of murdering two managers of Kazakhstan's Nurbank. As Akezhan Kazhegeldin noted in an interview with Deutsche Welle, Aliyev understood what was threatening him, and since he often acted like a psychopath (at the Kazakh embassy he once ordered a Russian woman who worked there as a cook to be cut bald), he could very well suddenly fall into depression and commit suicide . In any case, Aliyev took psychotropic drugs, says German political scientist Michael Laubsch, who knew him personally.

It became known that shortly before his death, Aliyev asked for a meeting with the Consul of Kazakhstan in Vienna and even returned his last name. He left two adult sons in his homeland, the grandsons of President Nazarbayev, the eldest of whom, Nurali Aliyev, was recently appointed deputy akim (mayor) of Astana. Kazakh authorities have already announced their readiness to take part in the investigation of what happened. However, the news of the suicide in Vienna did not come as a strong shock to the Kazakhstani elite - they have already begun to forget it in their homeland, although it pushed aside another sensation in the media space - the holding of early presidential elections on April 26. But in Austria, the suicide of a former Kazakhstani general could have serious political consequences, and there is already talk of the possible resignation of Brandstetter.