all official positions. Two days later, the Interior Ministry issued a new statement saying an international arrest warrant had been issued and investigators had been dispatched to Vienna, site of the OSCE's headquarters, to nab him. The new statement said charges involving criminal association, economic crimes, and kidnapping had been brought against Aliyev. 26 May 2007, Rakhat Aliyev was relieved of his position as Ambassador to Austria and stripped of his diplomatic immunity. Rakhat Aliyev was also accused of kidnapping a Russian TV executive working in Kazakhstan, Artyom Mikoyan, in the mid-1990s. and locked Mikoyan up in a basement where he kept him and said to Mikoyan that if he will give him all of the money that he made from his position (estimated 20 million), he will release and to tell no one about the incident. Artem Mikoyan fortunately managed to escape from Aliyev to Moscow and never to come back to Kazakhstan again. On 30 May, the Kazakh government formally asked Austria to arrest Aliyev for kidnapping and extradite him to Kazakhstan. Arrest warrants were being issued for others in the inner circle of this once-powerful man. On 30 May 2007 his diplomatic immunity was removed. In a statement, Aliyev described the charges as absurd and said he was the victim of a political witch-hunt. On 7 August 2007 a Vienna court rejected a request from Kazakhstan to extradite Aliyev and ruled against extraditing the son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who was wanted on charges of kidnapping. The court said the Rakhat Aliyev would not be given a fair trial in his home country and his human rights could not be guaranteed if he were sent back home. A criminal case against Aliyev and his accomplices ended in mid January 2008: abduction of three top managers of Nurbank in January 2007, the whereabouts of two of them is still unknown, and formation of an organized criminal group found guilty in raiding and document forgery. Almaty district court of Almaty sentenced Aliyev in absentia to 20 years in a high security prison with confiscation of property in this abduction case. The court also sentenced other people to lengthy prison terms. At the end of March 2008 Akmola Garrison Military Court found Rakhat Aliyev as a key person involved in preparations for a coup d'état and sentenced him to 20 years of imprisonment. Aliyev's sidekick Musayev, the ex- KNB