Eleven people were found responsible for storming the town of Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, and the presidential residence in 2022, on Monday, June 11. The verdict came after nine months of trial, in the longest case linked to Kazakhstan's "Bloody January," a period of unrest that remains a traumatic memory for Kazakhstan.

The defendants' lawyers said the decision was unfair. "Initially, the prosecutor was asking for between 10 and 12 years' imprisonment for these protesters," said Rinat Rafkhat, affiliated with the NGO International Legal Initiative in Almaty. "Faced with the lack of evidence presented during the trial, he lowered the requisitions to one and four years in prison. As in many trials linked to January 2022, the courts only consider the accusatory version," he said.

Similar trials are taking place in the cities where the unrest took place. In two years, almost 1,400 people have been convicted of "taking part in the riots" from January 2 to 10, 2022, spontaneous demonstrations that broke out in reaction to the rising price of liquid petroleum gas and turned into a political revolt against the authoritarian system that former president Nursultan Nazarbayev continued to dictate from behind the scenes. With the internet cut off, violence gripped the country for several days.

Fearing a coup d'état, the president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in office since 2019, on January 7, 2022, called for the deployment of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russian-dominated regional defense organization, and called for firing into the crowd "without warning" against the "20,000 bandits and terrorists" who, according to him, wanted to destabilize the country. According to official statistics, 238 people were killed and thousands more wounded.

The Kazakh leader took advantage of the chaos to consolidate his power and purge allies of former president Nazarbayev from the state apparatus, including the head of the national security committee in office at the time of the unrest, Karim Massimov. Massimov, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison in April 2023, was held responsible for organizing the unrest to carry out a coup. His trial, like dozens of others, was held behind closed doors and does not reveal the exact sequence of events in January 2022. "We're faced with a jigsaw puzzle. We're trying to put the pieces together to understand what happened," said an impatient Aina Shormanbayeva, president of the International Legal Initiative.

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