Suicide bombing in Kazakhstan, casualties

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the headquarters of the security services in Almaty early Tuesday, causing casualties, the Interfax news agency said. A car with one or two people inside exploded outside the entrance to the headquarters at around 3:30 am (0130 GMT) and body parts of the passengers were blown out by the force of the blast, witnesses told the agency. One witness showed the agency a video filmed on a mobile phone showing a headless body of a man lying around 10 metres (yards) from the centre of the explosion. Police and security service investigators at the scene declined to comment to the agency. The blast came just days after a suicide bombing outside the headquarters of the security service in the northwestern Kazakh city of Aktobe on May 17, which wounded three people including a member of the security services. Such attacks until now have been hugely rare in Kazakhstan, the most stable state in Central Asia which has been run since even before the fall of the Soviet Union by strongman President Nursultan Nazarbayev.