Former bodyguard of the President of Kazakhstan, Vadim Koshlyak, enters the court room prior to the start of the trial on April 14, 2015, in Vienna, Austria.(AFP Photo)
Kazakhstan's former intelligence head and an ex-bodyguard went on trial in Austria today in the latest instalment of a complex tale of murder, suicide and power struggles inside the autocratic gas-rich Central Asian state.
Astana accuses the two men, Alnur Mussayev and Vadim Koshlyak, of kidnapping two bank executives in Kazakhstan in 2007 and then murdering them by putting plastic bags on their heads and strangling them.
The main suspect, Rakhat Aliyev, who used to be married to President Nursultan Nazarbayev's daughter before falling out with the authoritarian "leader of the nation", was found hanged in his Austrian prison cell on February 24.
Austrian authorities said that this death was suicide but his lawyers have claimed that the 52-year-old was murdered. Results from a second autopsy and from a toxicology test are still outstanding.
Austria refused to extradite the three men and decided to try them in Vienna instead. Over the next 26 days, more than 60 witnesses are expected to testify, most of them flying in from Kazakhstan.
The bodies of the two bankers were found in 2011 buried underneath a rubbish dump in metal barrels filled with lime. Kazakh authorities say that the three suspects wanted them to sign over their shares in a local bank.