A zoo in the freezing steppes of Kazakhstan is giving its monkeys red wine to ward off winter colds, its chief animal specialist told Agence France Presse on Friday.

"We give the monkeys wine because in the winter it protects them from respiratory infections. You could say we douse them with wine to ward off flu," said Svetlana Pilyuk of the Karagandy zoo in the east of the ex-Soviet state.

Hundreds of people on Tuesday protested in Kazakhstan's largest city against elections swept by the ruling party of President Nursultan Nazarbayev that the opposition says was rigged.

Supporters of the anti-Nazarbayev All-National Social Democratic Party (OSDP) rallied under falling snow in Almaty, in a protest that was not sanctioned but was allowed to go ahead peacefully amid a heavy police presence.

Five militants and two members of an elite police force were killed in a clash in southern Kazakhstan, prosecutors said Sunday, amid concerns about rising Islamist unrest in the Central Asian state.

The clash took place during a special operation against suspected militants in a village just outside Kazakhstan's largest city and former capital of Almaty, where prosecutors said they had been planning attacks.

Leaders of the world's biggest gas suppliers ended their first summit on Tuesday by reiterating the need for a fair gas price while Iran, whose president was absent, warned that Western taxation will derail the energy market.

The 12-member Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) expressed in a declaration they issued after the one-day summit "the need to reach a fair price for natural gas based on gas to oil ... prices indexation."

Seven people were killed on Saturday in the southern Kazakh city of Taraz when a suspected Islamist went on shooting rampage and then blew himself up, officials said.

Kazakhstan's deputy prosecutor Nurmukhanbet Isayev said "a follower of jihadism carried out a series of especially grave crimes which led to the death of seven people, including five members of the security forces."

The leaders of China and Russia on Wednesday pressed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to show more cooperation to resolve the Iranian nuclear standoff, in a rare meeting at a regional security summit.

Presidents Hu Jintao and Dmitry Medvedev held separate meetings with Ahmadinejad but delivered a similar message of the need to improve dialogue, as the Iranian president again denounced the West as "slavers and colonizers".

Afghan President Hamid Karzai left Kabul on Tuesday for Kazakhstan to deliver a speech at a summit of Central Asian nations and hold talks with other regional powers, his office said.

He will present the views of Afghanistan on "regional cooperation, the war against terrorism, counter-narcotics and economic cooperation", it said in a statement.

A blast tore through a car Tuesday outside a security service building in the capital of Kazakhstan, killing two people in the second such incident in the usually stable Central Asian nation in a week.

Initial reports attributed the blast to a suicide bomber, but the ex-Soviet republic's interior ministry later played down the terror link.