Kazakh opposition figure held in Rome

ROME, July 14 (Reuters) - Kazakhstan's leading opposition figure and former prime minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin has been arrested in Italy on an international warrant, Italian police said on Friday.

A police spokesman said Kazhegeldin was detained at Rome's main Fiumicino airport on Wednesday morning and was being held awaiting an extradition request. He declined to say where the former premier was in detention.

In Kazakhstan, opposition parties attacked the detention, saying President Nursultan Nazarbayev was using international police to silence his main critic and political opponent.

Kazakhstan's KNB intelligence service said it had no details and the Prosecutor-General's office declined comment.

The opposition parties said the charges against Kazhegeldin were an attempt to deflect criticism from reports of a U.S. corruption probe that implicates Nazarbayev.

The U.S. weekly Newsweek magazine has reported that the FBI is looking into alleged payments by a U.S. businessman to top Kazakh officials including Nazarbayev. Kazakh officials have said the businessman broke no Kazakh laws.

"The powers-that-be want to draw away attention from the so-called Kazakhgate and focus it somewhere else," Bigeldy Gabdullin, deputy head of Kazhegeldin's Republican People's National Party, said.

"They wish to distract everyone from the scandal which is unfolding on the international arena," he told a news briefing which included leaders from several parties and groups.

BARRED FROM ELECTION

Kazhegeldin was prime minister from 1994-1997, but ran afoul of Kazakh authorities in late 1998 when he tried to run against Nazarbayev in a January 1999 presidential election.

Kazhegeldin was barred from the poll on a legal technicality. Nazarbayev won the vote easily, but the decision to exclude Kazhegeldin badly tarnished the country's democratic image in the West, an image which has got steadily worse since.

The government later opened criminal proceedings against Kazhegeldin, saying that it was part of an anti-corruption drive aimed at bringing to justice those who used their official positions to line their own pockets.

Kazhegeldin is now wanted in Kazakhstan on charges of tax evasion and money laundering as well as questions related to property ownership in Belgium and Switzerland.

He went into self-imposed exile in 1998 and was briefly detained by Russian authorities in Moscow last autumn.

A statement from Kazhegeldin's spokesman in the United States said lawyers had been told that there was an Interpol instruction to arrest him.

Gabdullin said a charge of "international terrorism" had been added to the list of accusations. Kazhegeldin has denied the charges against him and said they were politically based.

Kazhegeldin masterminded an aggressive policy of market reforms and privatisations as premier, making him a darling among Western investors but the target of criticism in Kazakhstan for selling too much too cheaply.

He says he is willing to answer the charges against him, but fears for his life if he returns home.

"It is important to stress that there is believed to be grave danger to his life if he is forced to return to Kazakhstan under these circumstances," his spokesman's statement said.

Reuters English News Service, 14 July 2000