The blast hit Astana 20-30 meters from pretrial detention center of Astana National Security Commission, Tengrinews.kz reports. This is exactly the distance between residential building No.6 at Shyntas street (this address is mentioned in official police statements) and the detention center located at 2 Shyntas street. Audi exploded on May 24, 2011. This is the second Tuesday in a row when there is an explosion with multiple human casualties in Kazakhstan. Last week there was a blast in Aktobe National Security Commission Department.

As per the residents of the nearby buildings in the blast area, body parts were scattered all over the area of 50-60 meters around the exploded car. Witnesses say that the explosion was so strong that parts of the bodies and the car were found in the kids area of the neighboring yard.

All windows are broken and walls are damaged by fragments in the building closest to the blast area (6 Shyntas street). The photos are not published for ethical reasons.

The emergency team took a large part of the car off the tops of a group of trees 30 meters away from the incident site, the locals said.

“I live in a five-storied building on Karasai batyr street. At 3.31 a.m. the windows in our house started trembling, there was a loud blast and windows were broken in places by the blast wave. I ran outside and came up to the blast area where people have already started gathered. There I saw a red Audi C4 with a Pavlodar plate number. I saw a part of a human body with my own eyes (I didn’t see the second person, I saw only one) under the windows of a nearby two-storied building. Body parts were even in my building's yard, almost 200 meters from the site. I found the documents, the cell phone. Both men (killed in the blast) were ethnic Russian. It is quite possible that it was not a terroristic act, as the car owner is part of a hunters’ society (the society ID was among the documents). Maybe the car had explosives used for fish inside, I don’t know. The fact is that the blast was very strong and the car parts flew apart many meters from the incident site. The emergency teams were slow. The first car (they were district police officers) came 20-25 minutes after. It took the rest even longer to arrive. Firemen arrived after 40 minutes. There was almost nothing left of the car, just a pile of metal,” one of Tengrinews.kz readers wrote to the editorial office asking to remain unidentified.

He said he looked at his watch at the moment of the blast. The time was 3.31 a.m. “The car was parked 15-20 meters from the two-storied building and at the same distance from the entrance to National Security Commission Department. There are no windows in the house now. Parts of the bodies and the car are in a different yard, around 150-200 meters from the site,” the reader added.

Astana Internal Affairs Department received the message about the blast near the building No.6 on Shyntas street at 03:37 a.m. on May 24. There were two corpses at the incident site.

Police found the driver’s license and hunting permit both in the name of Kyrgyzstan citizen Dmitriy Yuryevich Kelpler, 49 (the resident of Ekibastuz town of Pavlodar oblast, Kazakhstan) and the passport of Ivan Aleksandrovich Cheryomukhin, born in 1985, Kazakhstan citizen, convicted for theft and twice convicted for fraud, as well as for purchase and sale of illegally obtained property. Ivan Cheryomukhin also lived in Ekibastuz. Broken Sony-Ericsson mobile phone was also found at the accident site.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs fully excluded the possibility of terrorist act.

Head of press-service of Astana Department of Internal Affairs disclaimed the rumors that several people suspected to be behind the Aktobe blast had been delivered to the pretrial detention center of Astana National Security Commission several days before.


By Maksim Popov, Dana Mukhametzhan