A photo shows the damaged Nur-Otan party headquarters building in Almaty on January 8, 2022, after violence that erupted following protests over hikes in fuel prices. (Photo by AFP)

The former head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee, or KNB, has been detained on suspicion of high treason as unprecedented unrest rocked the country.

The security committee said in a statement on Saturday its former chief Karim Masimov and a number of other officials were detained on Thursday, without naming them.

On January 6 of this year the National Security Committee launched a pre-trial investigation into high treason, the statement said.

On the same day, on suspicion of committing this crime, former chairman of the KNB K.K. Masimov was detained and placed in a temporary detention center, along with others, it added.

Masimov’s detention came as he was fired from his post this week after protesters broke into government buildings in Kazakhstan’s largest city of Almaty.

Protests began in Kazakhstan on Sunday after a price hike on liquid petroleum gas (LPG). LPG is widely used to fuel cars in the west of the country.

Dozens of people have been killed in clashes on the streets, with rioters torching and ransacking public buildings in several cities in the worst violence in Kazakhstan’s 30 years of independence following the disintegration of the former Soviet Union.

The unrest was seen as an attempt by foreign parties to provoke color revolutions in the ex-Soviet country, modeled on the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which Russia has blamed on the West.

The unrest prompted Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who accused foreign-trained terrorist groups of being behind the unrest, to appeal for help from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) - a military alliance made up of Russia and five other former Soviet states - to quell the protests.

Tokayev said on Friday that constitutional order has largely been restored in all regions of the country.