Watchdog

ALMATY -- The leader of the nongovernmental organization Union of Kazakhstan's Muslims, Murat Telibekov, has been sentenced to seven days in jail.

The Almaty city police department announced that Telibekov was arrested on June 4 and sentenced the same day for violating the law on public gatherings.

Telibekov's wife, Yekaterina Chekanova, said earlier that her husband and his supporters were planning to gather in front of the Almaty mayor's office later on June 4.

They planned to call on Mayor Akhmetzhan Yesimov to discuss social issues faced by the residents of Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city.

The police department said Telibekov was detained after an Almaty resident reported that Telibekov had called him to take part in an "illegal public event."

With reporting by Interfax and Tengrinews

Russian officials say an airport manager has been beaten to death in the country's Far East because of his homosexuality.

Investigators said on June 3 that three detained men aged between 18 and 25 are suspected of killing the deputy director of Ozyornaya airport on Kamchatka Peninsula because of his "non-traditional sexual orientation."

The 39-year-old victim man has not been identified by name.

The incident happened in the village of Zaporozhye on May 29, weeks after a 23-year-old man was killed in the southwestern city of Volgograd for being gay.

Although Russia decriminalized homosexuality in the early 1990s, hostility toward gays and lesbians remains high there and in other nations of the former Soviet Union.

Based on reporting by Interfax, dpa, and RIA-Novosti