Austrian court charges Rakhat Aliyev with murder

Austrian prosecutors have charged the Kazakh president's former son-in-law turned opponent, Rakhat Aliyev, with the murder of two bankers in 2007, a Viennese court said on Tuesday, a case in which Kazakhstan has repeatedly requested his extradition.

Reuters said that the Austrian judge has not set any bail option for Aliyev.

Aliyev, once Kazakh ambassador to Austria who became a vocal critic of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, has previously denounced the case against him as politically motivated.

He lived in Malta up until June 2014, when he turned himself in for "investigative custody" in Vienna.

Kazakhstan attempted to have him extradited from Austria, but Vienna twice refused because of the former Soviet republic's human rights record. Instead it opened its own investigation in 2011. He could face up to 40 years in jail if extradited.

Aliyev's lawyers have two weeks to appeal the charges upon receiving them,

Austrian law prescribes at least 10 years in prison for anyone found guilty of murder.

In Malta, many attempts were made to have Aliyev investigated by the Maltese police for the alleged torture and frame-up of two Kazakh bodyguards in the late 1990s.

Pyotr Afanasenko and Satzhan Ibraev, the former bodyguards of Kazakh Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin, claimed that Aliyev – who while in Malta adopted his wife’s surname of Shoraz – was responsible for their illegal detention and torture under the administration of his father-in-law, dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, in the late 1990s.

After Aliyev self-exiled in Malta, the former bodyguards had filed a criminal complaint, calling on then-police commissioner John Rizzo and assistant commissioner Andrew Seychell to investigate and prosecute Aliyev over the torture claims.

Their complaint was however turned down in May 2013 after the police had insisted that they do not have the jurisdiction over claims which took place in Kazakhstan in the late 1990s.

Moreover, a Maltese court threw out the suit as there had been no prima facie proof that Aliyev had in fact committed crimes against humanity.

In August 2013, the two former bodyguards filed a fresh complaint, again asking the Maltese police to investigate their claims of torture. Once again, however, the police commissioner insisted that Malta did not have jurisdiction.