“My nephew was killed, and the authorities tried to detain my relatives!”

“On April 9 of this year, I called my sister in East Kazakhstan. She reported that my nephew, Dmitry Stryapchev, has died under unknown circumstances. He was born in 1976, and he was the son of our sister Anna, who died in February 2009.

Dmitry graduated from the Almaty University of Power Engineering & Telecommunications in 2003 with a degree in electrical engineering. He was married to Irina Stryapcheva. Together they had two daughters: Yulia, born in 2000, and Varvara, born in 2011. They were living in Ust-Kamenogorsk.

Dmitry worked for the Kazakhstan Electric Grid Company, which is controlled by the son-in-law of the President of Kazakhstan, Timur Kulibayev. Dmitry received a good salary, and his wife worked as an administrator at a sports and fitness center. But suddenly Dmitry was fired from his company without any explanation. He was only told that he was a relative of Khrapunov, and that was reason enough.

A man who was at that time director of the company called me, and he said that he received an order to dismiss my nephew from work. There was nothing more that he could do about it. At present, this man also no longer works for the company, and he has basically left Kazakhstan. One can only assume that he was a great asset to his company, but he was dismissed from his post because he had a telephone conversation with me. So Dmitry lost his job. His wife Irina had already been fired from her job for the same reason, and so the family was left without any means of support.

In order to feed his family Dmitry began to help his father, who has been a private entrepreneur for many years now. On April 8 Dmitry arrived home and prepared to go to a meeting with a man. He promised to be back home in an hour and a half. However, he never returned home, and he did not answer his cell phone. His wife phoned all their relatives and friends, but to no avail.

The next day a garage complex watchman called her. He reported that he found the corpse of her husband in the garage owned by Dmitry. The frightened Irina went to the garage complex. Police officers had already arrived there, and they asked Irina to identify the body of her husband. They took the body to the morgue for forensic examination to determine the cause of death. Dmitry’s cell phone contained an unsent text message: “I only wanted to do good.”

However, to judge from the evidence, Dmitry was not planning on dying. He had plans for the future. He was supposed to meet with his father on Saturday, April 13. In addition, the director of one of his father’s companies had hired Dmitry, and he was to begin working at his new job on Monday, April 15.

On April 10, 2013, Irina was issued her husband’s death certificate, and it did not list the cause of death. When Irina asked questions, she was simply told that the certificate was drafted according to standard form. There was nothing more that she could do.

Dmitry’s body was laid to rest on April 11, 2013. He would have turned 37 years old in May.

There are many unanswered questions arising out of this story. First of all, why were Dmitry’s relatives not given the results of the forensic medical examination? Why has no criminal investigation been launched into the killing of Dmitry Stryapchev? Why have people that Dmitry talked to on the day of his death and on the previous day not been questioned? Why has there not been an investigation into who wrote that text message? Was it Dmitry himself or someone else? Why has the person whom Dmitry set off to meet not been identified? Why has the body of the deceased not been examined for the presence or absence of signs of violent death?

These questions need to be answered, particularly in light of the fact that the authorities also tried to illegally detain my close relatives who came to Dmitry’s funeral. They had legitimate questions: ‘Why are you trying to prevent me from flying out of Kazakhstan? On whose authority are you trying to detain me illegally?’ No one at the airport could give a clear answer. The representatives of all government agencies that are responsible under the laws of the Republic of Kazakhstan for restricting the movement of certain categories of citizens had issued statements that these individuals had no travel restrictions. These statements advised that superfluous questions should not be asked. Only thanks to the persistence of lawyers was this situation somehow able to be resolved.

The Kazakh authorities, it seems, had hoped that I would secretly fly in to attend my nephew’s funeral, and that they would be able to seize me then. But perhaps they had hatched the more realistic plan of holding my close relatives as hostages in order to blackmail me into paying a voluntary visit to Kazakhstan. This is the only explanation that I can think of in order to make sense of all that has happened.

Viktor KHRAPUNOV.”