ALMATY (Reuters) - A Kazakh court gave a pro-opposition blogger a two-year suspended jail sentence on Monday for libeling President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Kazis Toguzbayev, 58, was found guilty of insulting the long-serving Kazakh leader in two articles published on the Web log www.kub.kz by alleging that Nazarbayev bore responsibility for the murder of an opposition politician in February 2006.
"Toguzbayev publicly insulted the president's honor and dignity," Natalia Rusakova, an Almaty regional court judge, told the courtroom as she read out the sentence.
The prosecutor had asked for three years of labor in a penal colony, but the judge softened the sentence because of Toguzbayev's age and the fact that he had no criminal record.
The killing of moderate opposition leader Altynbek Sarsenbaiuly a year ago led the opposition to accuse Nazarbayev's government of staging a cover-up.
Ten people, including state security officers, were jailed last year, but the opposition criticized their trial as a sham designed to conceal Sarsenbaiuly's real killers.
Toguzbayev alleged that Nazarbayev's allies were behind the murder. In one article, he wrote that "in a certain sense Nazarbayev is the killer."
Nazarbayev, in power since 1989, has backed the official version of Sarsenbaiuly's killing which stated that he was murdered in a personal dispute with a top civil servant.
Most Kazakh media are under state control and any criticism of Nazarbayev is taboo. Opposition reporters operate on the Internet or work for small-circulation newspapers.
Internet use is not widespread in Kazakhstan, a vast, thinly populated Central Asian nation to the west of China, and most Web users are concentrated in the commercial capital Almaty.
And they wonder why people in the west do not take them seriously. If those who insulted our imperious leader...um, I mean President Bush... We would run out of room in Guantanamo Bay.
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