ASTANA -- A court in the Kazakh capital, Astana, has sentenced opposition politician Nurzhan Altaev to 15 days in jail over his support for protesting oil workers from the Central Asian nation's volatile town of Zhanaozen.
An RFE/RL correspondent reported from Astana that a court sentenced Altaev on April 12 after finding him guilty of violating regulations on holding public gatherings.
Altaev was detained after he called on Astana residents to stage a rally near a police station in the city where dozens of oil workers from Zhanaozen were kept after they were detained a day earlier.
More than 80 former workers from the BerAli Manghystau Company were detained on April 11 in Astana after they spent a night in front of the Energy Ministry building demanding jobs at OzenMunaiGaz, a subsidiary of the oil-rich nation's energy giant KazMunaiGaz.
The workers said they lost their jobs after their company recently failed to win a tender for oil work in the energy-rich western region of Manghystau.
SEE ALSO: Police In Astana Detain Dozens Of Protesting Oil Workers From Volatile ZhanaozenThe workers were released late in the night and the majority of them were forced to leave Astana for Zhanaozen by train early in the morning on April 12. Less than a dozen of the workers remain in the capital.
Zhanaozen, located in Kazakhstan's southwest, was the scene of mass anti-government rallies in 2011 staged by oil workers that resulted in the deaths of at least 16 people when police opened fire on unarmed protesters.
In early January last year, other protests in the volatile town over abrupt energy price hikes quickly spread across the tightly controlled former Soviet republic and led to violent clashes in the country's largest city, Almaty, and elsewhere that left at least 238 people, including 19 law enforcement officers, dead.
President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev then moved to deprive influential former President Nursultan Nazarbaev of his lifetime post atop the Kazakh Security Council, taking the position himself.
The crisis prompted Toqaev to seek help from troops from the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to quell the unrest.
Toqaev's moves since then appear aimed at weakening Nazarbaev, his relatives, and close allies.