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MOSCOW — Kazakhstan has called the playing of a spoof of its national anthem at an interna­tional sporting event “a scandal" and demanded an investigation of the incident.

Maria Dmitrienko won a gold medal for Kazakhstan on Thurs­day at the Arab Shooting Cham­pionships in Kuwait, but during the award ceremony, the public address system broadcast the spoof anthem from the 2006 movie Borat, which offended many Kazakhs by portraying the country as backward and degen­erate.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Ilyas Omarov told the ITAR-Tass news agency the incident “is, of course, a scandal and demands a thorough investigation, which we intend to conduct."

ITAR-Tass quoted shooting team member Oksana Stavit­skaya as saying that Asian Shoot­ing Federation President Sheikh Salman al-Sabah had apologized to the team.

“Sheikh Salman personally apologized to us. He recognized that the use of the music from the scandalous film in place of the anthem of Kazakhstan was completely a mistake of the or­ganizers. He explained that the awards ceremony was conducted by a firm under contract," Stavit­skaya said. The Kazakh news agency Tengri quoted team coach Anvar Yunusmetov as saying tourna­ment organizers had downloaded various countries’ national an­thems from the Internet.

Later on Saturday, the event’s organizers in Kuwait also apol­ogized to the Kazakh delegation regarding the “unintentional" mistake of playing the “wrong national anthem" during the awards ceremony, according to the statement published on the state-owned Kuwait News Agency.

The Organizing Committee, in a statement, said the mistake was corrected and the national anthem of Kazakhstan was re­played afterward. The committee expressed “deep sorrow" for the mistake and reaffirmed that ties between the sporting communi­ties of the two countries re­mained strong.

PEIBeerGuy wrote:Awesome. SBC must have loved it!