The West Kazakhstan region's police department told RFE/RL on April 30 that journalist Raul Uporov, who extensively covered ongoing unprecedented floods in the city of Oral, had been charged with hooliganism.

A day earlier, Uporov said on Facebook that police were forcibly taking him to a police station to officially charge him in an administrative case.

He later said that the case against him was launched over his online video about a move by the local Emergencies Department to ban journalists from visiting areas affected by the floods and filing reports from such places.

The department explained the move by citing "safety precautions," while Uporov harshly criticized the move in a video he made about the floods, which was posted on Instagram. Police said they considered some of the words used by Uporov in the video "vulgar" and filed a hooliganism charge against the reporter.

Meanwhile, the situation around floods caused by abrupt warm weather that led to massive snowmelt in late March remains complicated in the western Atyrau region.

The Kazakh Emergencies Ministry said on April 30 that rescue teams from 10 regions and military personnel remain in the Atyrau region to monitor the water level in the Ural River every hour.

The ministry said a day earlier that, among those who were forced to flee the flooding, 38,521 people had returned home, adding that some of the rescue teams and military personnel deployed to help flood-affected regions had started leaving as water levels begin to recede.

In all, about 120,000 people, including 44,000 children, had been evacuated from areas affected by the floods.

According to the ministry, 17,000 of its rescue experts and military personnel, as well almost 2,000 equipped vehicles, have been involved in the rescue efforts in the flood-affected regions of the Central Asian nation's northern regions.

At least five people died in Kazakhstan during the floods, while at least four have been missing since early April.