Third frozen death of the winter on the Chu road

NURZHAN — A 47-year-old man from a village on the Chu road was found dead of cold on the verge about four kilometres from his home early on Saturday, the Nurzhan district police said. He had left a wedding in a neighbouring village on foot shortly after midnight, when the temperature was minus 24.

Police said the man had been drinking and appeared to have sat down to rest. It is the third death of its kind on the Chu road and its villages this winter, after a man of 52 in December and a man of 38 earlier this month. Relatives found him after he failed to come home.

Doctors at the Nurzhan district hospital said deaths of men walking home drunk in winter were "a tradition nobody wants". The district administration said it would ask village heads to keep a car at every wedding for guests who live along the road, as some villages already do.

"Everyone knows the rule: if you drink, you sleep where you drank," said a village head near Chu. "Everyone also knows that nobody keeps it."