DPA
Vienna

A former intelligence chief and an aide to a vice foreign minister from Kazakhstan went on trial in Vienna yesterday on charges of murdering two bankers in their country.
The crime was perpetrated in the Central Asian country in 2007 and the two defendants were eventually apprehended in Austria.
The trial is taking place in the Austrian capital because local judicial authorities do not believe a fair trial can be guaranteed in Kazakhstan.
The main defendant is no longer alive. Rakhat Aliyev, a former deputy foreign minister of Kazakhstan, was found hanged in his Vienna detention cell in February.
Aliyev, his aide Vadim Koshlyak and Alnur Mussayev, the former intelligence chief, murdered the Nurbank managers because the two men had embezzled money from the bank in which Aliyev held a majority stake, prosecutor Bettina Wallner told the court.
The three had abducted, tortured, drugged and killed their victims, according to the prosecution. Their bodies were discovered in lime barrels in a landfill near Almaty in 2011.
The indictment “sounds like a Hollywood film. But unfortunately I have to tell you that these things did happen”, Wallner said.
Aliyev, the former son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, became ambassador in Austria shortly after the killings.
Aliyev had claimed that the murder accusations were raised after he had showed ambitions for the presidential post.
The defendants were victims of political persecution, Mussayev’s attorney Martin Mahrer told the court, arguing that Nazarbayev resented Aliyev because of his ideas for political reform.
Mahrer also charged that prosecutors relied on evidence and testimonies from Kazakhstan that were manipulated.
“Human rights violations, torture, blackmailing and influencing of witnesses occur daily,” he said, calling the country a “post-Stalinist dictatorship”.
The prosecution maintained that it carried out its investigation independently from the Kazakh judicial authorities, which have found the three former officials guilty in their absence and handed down long prison terms.
The court plans to fly in 60 witnesses from Kazakhstan to testify in the trial, which is scheduled to last for 26 days of hearings.