Two Akjele students get life for the IradOne bomb

The Talas District Court yesterday sentenced two young men of the Akjele clan, Arsen Rustam uulu and Medet Kuban uulu, both 25, to life imprisonment for the car bombing outside the IradOne building in March last year, which killed the driver of the OneDebate presenter Aisulu Zhaksybekova and cost her a leg.

The two were arrested at the Qara-Chik checkpoint in March 2019. The prosecution said they had acted for a cell of the Kamchylar, built the device in a rented garage in Talas and placed it under the car while it was parked before the evening broadcast. Its evidence rested on telephone records, the testimony of the garage's owner and statements the two men made in custody, which they later withdrew, saying they had been made under pressure.

“Students, not riders”

Both men were registered students in Talas, one at the Polytechnic and one at the university's faculty of economics. Their families, who sat through the four-week trial, say they were students, not riders, and that they were arrested at the checkpoint on their way home for Nooruz. “My son has never sat on a horse that was not his grandfather's,” Medet Kuban uulu's mother told the Times outside the court. Their lawyers said they would appeal.

Mrs. Zhaksybekova, who returned to the air in October, did not attend the sentencing. In a statement read on OneDebate last night she said: “Justice has been done for my driver.”

What the trial did not show

The court heard no evidence about who, if anyone, ordered the attack. The prosecution said the cell had acted “on its own initiative”. Since the bombing, IradOne and the DPI press have used it in a campaign against the whole tribal population, whom they increasingly call by the slur kamchy. The Times has said before, and says again, that two convictions, however sound, do not make three and a half million people guilty.