BISHKEK, Sept 22: A top Kyrgyz lawmaker and key figure in this ex-Soviet state’s popular revolution in March, Bayaman Erkinbayev, was shot dead outside his house late on Wednesday in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, the country’s interior minister said.

“When the deputy came out of his car in front of his house he was shot at from behind some bushes. He died from his injuries in intensive care at the national hospital,” Interior Minister Murat Sutalinov told an emergency session of parliament on Thursday.

Erkinbayev, a former martial arts champion and one of the richest men in this Central Asian nation, was an influential businessman who owned factories, hotels and entertainment complexes in the south of the country.

He played an active part in a popular revolution in March that toppled veteran president Askar Akayev by financing protests and sending in martial arts trainees to lead the demonstrations.

Erkinbayev, who had a reputation as a playboy, was a devotee of Alysh, Kyrgyzstan’s answer to Kung Fu.

His trainees, believed to number around 2,000, moved across the southern cities of Jalal-Abad, Osh and Batken in the March events, capturing government sites, burning down police stations and blocking key highways in the lead-up to the chaos that deposed Akayev.

But the country was rocked by unrest, including assassinations, in the aftermath of the March revolution amid political wrangling and a struggle for control of key businesses in this impoverished state on China’s western border.

“I am very sad. This is a great loss for Kyrgyzstan,” President Kurmanbek Bakiyev told lawmakers.

Parliamentary deputies were debating a motion on Thursday calling on Bakiyev to sack Sutalinov, National Security Service chief Tashtemir Aitbayev, Security Council head Miroslav Niyazov and Prosecutor-General Busurmankul Tabaldiyev for not ensuring security in the country.—AFP