Deadly street race allegations pull senior police officers into Kazakhstan crash scandal
What happened in Almaty was never going to remain a routine traffic case. In the early hours of 21 March, on Al Farabi Avenue, a Zeekr crossed into oncoming traffic and hit a Mercedes head on. The Mercedes driver, aged 29, and two women, aged 20 and 22, died at the scene. The Zeekr driver survived and was taken to hospital, and from that point the case stopped being only about a crash. It became a test of what, and who, Kazakhstan’s police system is willing to expose.
The political charge arrived almost instantly. Social media posts claimed the Zeekr may have been part of a late night street race, and one of the alleged participants was said to be a service car linked to a senior Almaty police official. MP Murat Abenov publicly demanded answers from the Interior Ministry, which meant the story quickly shifted from reckless driving to something more damaging, the suspicion that the real scandal might sit not only behind the wheel, but somewhere inside the chain of protection around it.
The ministry responded like an institution that understood the danger at once. Interior Minister Erzhan Sadenov sent senior officials from internal security, administrative police and personnel units to Almaty. The ministry also opened criminal investigations into the possible illegal issuance of state number plates and into the alleged inaction of the driver attached to one of the police department’s leaders. The deputy head of Almaty police responsible for road safety, along with the heads of administrative police and public safety, lost their posts.
The Zeekr driver was arrested after a court approved custody. Officials said he was mildly intoxicated at the time of the crash, though the publicly announced case was opened under Part 4 of Article 345 of Kazakhstan’s Criminal Code, the provision covering traffic violations that negligently cause the deaths of two or more people. The sanction under that article runs to a maximum of 10 years in prison.
The wider road safety backdrop does not exactly make the case feel like an anomaly. Kazakhstan recorded more than 36,000 road accidents in 2025, up 14.4 per cent on the year before. More than 51,000 people were injured and roughly 2,300 were killed. Around a third of all crashes were concentrated in Almaty city and Almaty region, which is a grim enough statistic on its own and grimmer still when one of the country’s most resonant crashes lands in exactly the same geography.
That is what gives this story its weight. It is not only about one ruined Mercedes and one Zeekr driver who survived. It is about the suspicion, now serious enough to cost senior officers their jobs and trigger criminal inquiries, that speed on Almaty’s roads may be policed differently depending on who is driving. Once that suspicion enters the file, the crash stops being only a tragedy. It becomes a test of whether the state is investigating a collision, or itself.
