2016 shooting of Almaty police officers

On 18 July 2016, Ruslan Kulikbayev, a 26-year-old Salafi jihadist and former convict, carried out a series of shootings in Almaty, Kazakhstan that killed 10 people, including eight police officers and two civilians, and wounded more than a dozen others. The attack came roughly a month after the 2016 Aktobe shootings, in which 25 people were killed in separate incidents.

According to reporting reconstructed from Kazakh authorities, at 3:52 a.m. local time Kulikbayev shot and killed an Uzbek woman, described as an alleged prostitute, in a taxicab, then forced the driver to take him to Almaty. He had initially planned to attack an Almaty courthouse but changed course after seeing large numbers of civilians there, instead directing the taxi driver toward a police station. He released the driver unharmed near the station; the driver was later briefly detained by police before being cleared as an accomplice.

At around 11:00 a.m., Kulikbayev shot and killed a police officer outside the station and took his assault rifle, then began firing indiscriminately at officers and civilians nearby. He carjacked a vehicle, killing its driver, then drove to a building housing offices of Kazakhstan's National Security Committee, where he shot and wounded a police officer and an NSC official; the official later died in hospital. Kulikbayev then hijacked a second vehicle and fled, leading police on a high-speed chase that ended in a gunfight in which several more officers were wounded, three of whom later died of their injuries. Kulikbayev surrendered after being shot five times and was hospitalized, where he confessed to the attacks and the earlier killing of the taxi passenger, stating he intended to kill police but not civilians.

Separately, at least two other individuals connected to Kulikbayev carried out attacks in and around Almaty the same day; one was killed in a shootout with police and the other arrested. In the following days, police arrested and charged four additional suspects with links to the attack.

Four of the police officers killed were identified as Captain Bauyrzhan Nurmakhanbetov, 28; Junior Sergeant Maksat Salimbaev, 24; Starshina Ayan Galiev, 42; and Lieutenant Timur Begasilov, 29, who died of his wounds the day after the attack.

On 2 November 2016, a Kazakh court convicted Kulikbayev and five co-defendants of charges including murder, attempted murder, and terrorism. Kulikbayev was sentenced to death, the first such sentence in Kazakhstan in nearly a decade, though the country had maintained a moratorium on executions since 2003. His five accomplices received prison terms ranging from three to 10.5 years. Following Kazakhstan's ratification of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in December 2020, the death penalty was abolished nationwide, and Kulikbayev's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment; he had been the only person on Kazakhstan's death row.