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When Aidos Sadykov, a Kazakh opposition journalist, was shot in the head at the wheel of his car in broad daylight in downtown Kyiv on June 18, his wife, Natalia, was at his side. "We were driving through the courtyard of our apartment building when I saw a man in a dark cap, glasses and beard, pointing a pistol with a silencer at us," she said. "I shouted, ‘Aidos, get down!’ But just then, a bullet shattered the driver’s side window and hit him." After 13 days in intensive care, the 55-year-old journalist and father of three succumbed to his injuries on July 2.

Ukrainian investigators soon identified two suspects, both Kazakh citizens. Arriving in Kyiv on June 2, Meiram Karatayev, 33, and Altai Zhakanbayev, 36, rented two apartments to monitor Sadykov before murdering him on the orders of an "unidentified person," according to the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office. The suspects then fled to Moldova.

Unveiled by Kazakh journalists, their links with Kazakhstan’s special services are fueling the hypothesis of a murder ordered from the upper echelons of the state. According to the independent media service Respublika, Karatayev worked first as a local police officer and then in the special forces in the Kostanay region, before continuing his service in Almaty. The other suspect, Altai Zhakanbayev, was linked to the National Security Committee, the country’s main security service, according to journalists from Radio Azattyk, the Kazakh branch of the American station Radio Free Europe. After Moldova, Zhakanbayev returned to Kazakhstan, where he handed himself in to the police on June 21, while Karatayev, still at large, was placed on Ukraine’s wanted list.