Kazakhstan has called the playing of a spoof of its national anthem at an international sporting event “a scandal”, and demanded an investigation.
Maria Dmitrienko won a gold medal for Kazakhstan on Thursday at the Arab Shooting Championships in Kuwait, but during the awards ceremony the public address system broadcast the spoof anthem from the 2006 movie Borat, starring Sacha Baron Cohen, which offended many Kazakhs by portraying the country as backwards and degenerate.
The team's coach told Kazakh media the organisers of the Kuwait tournament had downloaded the parody from the internet by mistake and had also got the Serbian national anthem wrong.
Footage of Thursday's original ceremony shows gold medallist Maria Dmitrienko listening solemnly to the anthem before smiling.
Foreign ministry spokesman Ilyas Omarov told the ITAR-Tass news agency in Russia the incident “is, of course, a scandal and demands a thorough investigation, which we intend to conduct”.
ITAR-Tass reported shooting team member Oksana Stavitskaya as saying that Asian Shooting Federation president Sheikh Salman al-Sabah had apologised to the team.
The Borat movie praises Kazakhstan for its superior potassium exports and for having the cleanest prostitutes in the region.