A man shot dead two police officers and three other people on Monday when the authorities evicted him from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan's biggest city, police said.
A police statement carried by Russian news agencies said that a man served an eviction notice "opened fire" on court bailiffs, police officers and emergency ministry officials before being detained and disarmed.
In addition to the two police officers, the shooter killed the "new owner" of the property, another civilian and a court bailiff, Almaty's deputy police chief Rustam Abdrakhmanov told journalists near the crime scene.
The man fired at his victims with a hunting rifle, said Abdrakhmanov, adding that women and children had been in the property at the time.
The incident comes as problems with mortgage repayments in the Central Asian country have seen debtors mobilize in recent years as oil prices have collapsed, pummelling local purchasing power.
The situation has been compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.
Kazakhstan's president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin exchanged condolences on a day when a gunman killed six people on a university campus in the Russian city of Perm.
Putin "asked to convey words of sympathy to the families of those killed as a result of the shooting incident in Almaty," according to a Kremlin readout covering the pair's telephone call.
The Almaty shooting took place around 5:00 pm local time (1100 GMT) in the Akbulak district of Almaty, Kazakhstan's economic capital in the south of the country.
Police did not give the name of the shooter, saying only that he was born in 1967.
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