Six men have been jailed in Kazakhstan for conspiring to assassinate government officials, indicating a possible rise in Islamist violence in the oil-rich country.
Kazakhstan, a mainly Muslim nation the size of Western Europe but with a population of just 17 million, had until recently seemed less prone to the religious violence more common in some of the poorer post-Soviet Central Asian states.
The court said the men were part of a "terrorist group" which planned to kill senior officials at the opening of a new opera and ballet theatre in the capital Astana.
One member of the group had trained his under-age Muslim wife as a suicide bomber to detonate the charge. The group was arrested in January.
"Serik Koshalakov, the leader of the criminal group, was sentenced to 10 years in a high-security prison and his property will be confiscated," Supreme Court spokesman Yevgeny Drobyazko said. The other members were sentenced to between five-and-a-half and 10 years.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a 73-year-old former steelworker, has ruled the country with a firm hand for more than two decades, overseeing fast economic growth and more than $170 billion in foreign direct investment.
In recent years the secular nation has been hit by explosions and skirmishes between security forces and radical Islamists.
