ASTANA – The Kazakh security authorities and the Prosecutor General’s Office detained on March 4 Arkady Klebanov (Manevich), a Kazakh citizen suspected of ordering and organizing a series of recent attacks on journalists, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Photo credit: gov.kz.
According to Albina Makhambetova, chief of communications department at the Kazakh Internal Affairs Ministry, Klebanov admitted his guilt, saying he arranged all the attacks himself due to personal motives and long-standing grievances against several prominent representatives of the Kazakh media.
Klebanov recruited a group of hackers who committed illegal actions online. He paid the perpetrators from the profits he received from cryptocurrency operations.
Earlier, the Almaty Court detained a foreign citizen, identified as O. Tokarev, suspected of coordinating the provocative attacks. He confessed and agreed to assist in the investigation by naming his four accomplices, identified as K. Litvinov, S. Shapovalov, B. Demchenko, and Y. Malyshok.
According to the investigation, Litvinov, Shapovalov, and Demchenko searched for and recruited those who would commit the attacks. They also collected information about the victims from open sources. They were looking for people who had access to state information databases, said Makhambetova.
