Watchdog

A Kazakh journalist and civic activist has accused authorities of involvement in his stabbing as he was traveling by train to meet European officials to discuss media freedoms in the Central Asian state.

Ramazan Yesergepov made the comments in Almaty, the country’s economic hub and largest city, where he was receiving medical treatment after being transferred on May 16 from a hospital in the southern city of Shu.

Yesergepov, the former editor in chief of the independent newspaper Alma-Ata Info, says he was attacked by two men and stabbed in the stomach on May 14 as he was traveling by train from Almaty to the capital, Astana.

He has since undergone an operation, and his surgeon says his condition is now satisfactory.

Speaking to reporters outside the Almaty hospital where he was being treated, Yesergepov claimed that "authorities are behind" his stabbing.

Yesergepov, 61, was released from prison in 2012 after serving a three-year sentence for his conviction on charges of disclosing state secrets. He now runs nongovernmental organization called Journalists In Trouble and is fighting for his formal rehabilitation from the conviction.

Interior Ministry spokesman Almas Sadubaev told RFE/RL on May 15 that Yesergepov received three stab wounds in the incident, and that the authorities had launched a probe in the matter.

ASTANA -- A court in Kazakhstan has sentenced labor union leader Amin Eleusinov to two years in prison.

The court handed down the sentence on May 16 after convicting Eleusinov, a union leader at the Oil Construction Company (OCC), of embezzlement and of publicly insulting, assaulting, and refusing to obey a representative of state authority.

Eleusinov was arrested in January after hundreds of OCC workers went on hunger strike for two weeks to protest the closure of a trade union alliance.

The strike was stopped after a court in the Central Asian nation declared it illegal.

Union activist Nurbek Qushaqbaev, who was arrested along with Eleusinov, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison in April after a court convicted him of instigating an illegal strike.

Amnesty International condemned Qushaqbaev's conviction, calling it part of the "destruction of the independent trade union movement in Kazakhstan."

Oil and gas revenues are crucial to Kazakhstan's economy, and budget, and longtime President Nursultan Nazarbaev's government tolerates little dissent.