Kazakh leader says he ordered probe into son-in-law

ALMATY, June 7 (Reuters) Kazakhstan's president said today he had personally ordered prosecutors to investigate kidnapping accusations against his son-in-law, who is in Austria facing an extradition hearing.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev used an online chat room to make his first public comment about the criminal proceedings against his son-in-law Rakhat Aliyev after the two fell out publicly and Aliyev was sacked as ambassador to Austria.

The case has shocked observers of the oil-producing Central Asian state, where disputes among the elite are usually kept behind closed doors. It comes as Nazarbayev, 66, signed a law lifting any limit on how long he can remain in office.

Nazarbayev said prosecutors and police had passed him a statement from the wives of two bankers at mid-sized Nurbank who have disappeared, accusing Aliyev of kidnapping them. The bank is part owned by Aliyev.

''They were ordered to investigate to the end,'' Nazarbayev said on a government webcast at http://e.gov.kz in his first Internet news conference. ''I ordered the general prosecutor to investigate in the most legal way.'' ''For me, for my family this was a difficult decision to take,'' Nazarbayev said, adding it proved everyone was equal before the law.

Aliyev, who has said he would like to run for president in 2012, has denied the accusations of kidnapping and said his life would be at risk if he was extradited home.

Austrian police have released him on bail while he awaits extradition proceedings.

Temporary bans on two of the media companies owned by Aliyev, television station KTK and newspaper Karavan, were lifted yesterday, though the television station has dropped news broadcasts and the paper has agreed not to report on the kidnapping investigation.

Asked about the bans, Nazarbayev said: ''As for freedom of speech - freedom of speech is not freedom from responsibility.'' ''Today KTK is working. Karavan is working. They corrected the violations of the law that they made,'' he said without specifying what laws they broke.

According to Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan has 820,000 Internet users among its population of 15 million. He also fielded questions about high prices for online access and housing but a prank technical question about computer software - the most popular query posted on the webcast site - went unanswered.

One person named as Jack also asked Nazarbayev how much he earned as president of the former Soviet state.

''Interesting. Jack ... ''I'll answer it this way: my pay isn't bad perhaps but as always it is little... I know well what I'm worth - always more than my pay.'' REUTERS GL VV1809