A leading Kazakh sinologist and former senior government adviser, Konstantin Syroyezhkin, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison on high-treason charges in 2019, has been released on parole five years early.
Political observer Anton Morozov wrote on Facebook late on April 4 that the 67-year-old scholar was released from a maximum-security prison. No further details were immediately available. Syroyezhkin has not commented publicly.
Syroyezhkin was sentenced on October 7, 2019. Details of the charges were not made public, but some local media outlets, as well as The Wall Street Journal, reported then that Syroyezhkin was accused of passing classified information on to Chinese nationals for cash.
It is unknown if Syroyezhkin has the right to remain in his native Kazakhstan, as some reports said at the time of his conviction that he was stripped off his Kazakh citizenship and banned from residing in Kazakhstan for five years after his release.
Kazakh authorities were reluctant to officially announce his arrest more than five years ago. Questions about Syroyezhkin's whereabouts started circulating in the media after he failed to show up at two conferences in Kazakhstan he was scheduled to attend.
Syroyezhkin was born in the southeastern Kazakh city of Almaty, which between 1927-1997 was the capital and is now its largest city.
In 1981, Syroyezhkin graduated the Highest School of the Soviet KGB in Moscow with a specialization on China.
From 2006 until his arrest in 2019, Syroyezhkin worked as a leading expert and analyst at the presidential Institute for Strategic Research.
Syroyezhkin is the author of more than 1,000 analytical and research works on China and Kazakh-Chinese relations, written in Russian, Chinese, and English.
In the past, when current Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, who is a trained sinologist as well, served as prime minister, Syroyezhkin was his adviser on Kazakh-Chinese relations, including during talks on delimiting and demarcating the Kazakh-Chinese border.