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Along-smoldering clan war inside the inner circle of Kazakhstan's strongman President, Nursultan Nazar-bayev, has burst into the open. Last month, opposition leader Altynbek Sarsenbayev, 43, and two aides were killed by state security ( knb) officers. The killing exposed rivalries among those bidding to succeed Nazarbayev, 65, Kazakhstan's leader since 1989. Though Nazarbayev just won a third seven-year term, Oleg Panfilov, a Moscow-based human-rights campaigner and expert on central Asia, says Sarsenbayev was seen as a challenge to other potential contenders for the presidency.

According to many Kazakh and Russian newspapers and websites, two of those contenders are within the President's own family.

His daughter Dariga's clan includes her politically well-connected husband, First Deputy Foreign Minister Rakhat Aliyev. Her sister Dinara is married to Timur Kulibayev, the former deputy head of KazTransOil, the country's oil pipeline monopoly. A third ambitious clan outside the immediate family centers around Senate Speaker Nurtai Abykayev, the elder Nazarbayev's longtime right-hand man.

After Sarsenbayev's assassination, some in the Kazakh media zeroed in on Aliyev, formerly the knb deputy chief, as the man behind the killing. Aliyev publicly denied all such charges and threatened legal action against the press. The Interior Ministry issued a statement exonerating him of complicity. Baurzhan Mukhamedzhanov, the Interior Minister, declared that the real culprit was Yerzhan Utembayev, the Senate's chief of staff, who allegedly confessed to putting out a $60,000 contract on Sarsenbayev "for reasons of personal enmity." Human-rights campaigner Panfilov regards that version as an attempt to discredit Abykayev, who is Utem-bayev's boss. But late last week, the President spoke up for his old ally Abykayev.

In an effort to cool tensions, Nazarbayev addressed the nation, promising that justice would be done, and calling for order. That did little to convince citizens he would make good on promises of reform and democratization. "They present the Sarsenbayev murder as a single crime by rogue security officers, rather than recognize that [people] vie for power in this country using the most brutal methods," says Nurlan Nurimbetov, a political analyst in Almaty.

• YURI ZARAKHOVICH
• How rivalries in the Kazakhstan president's inner circle have burst into the open