Content area
Full Text
Excerpt from report by Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency
Shymkent, 17 October: [Kazakhstan] should step up considerably the protection of the state border with Uzbekistan, the head of the Ontustik (South) regional border directorate of the Kazakh National Security Committee's (NSC's) border service, Maj-Gen Talgat Yesetov, believes.
"The southern border is the most difficult for Kazakhstan [due to] the real threat of extremism and terrorism, illegal migration, drug trafficking, organized criminal groups, the large-scale smuggling of goods ... [ellipsis as published]. One commits a crime in Shymkent and goes into hiding in Tashkent streets and vice versa," Yesetov told journalists today. The journalists were covering a working visit of the head of the NSC's border service, Lt- Gen Bolat Zakiyev, to the Kazakh-Uzbek border. Shymkent is the administrative centre of South Kazakhstan Region [SKR].