Two Chinese citizens who sought asylum in Kazakhstan after escaping from Beijing's troubled Xinjiang region will not be returned to China, a court in the Central Asian country ruled Tuesday.

Kaster Musakhan and Murager Alimuly were sentenced by a court in Kazakhstan to a year in jail for illegally crossing the border the two countries share, their lawyer Lazzat Akhat told AFP.

But the court determined that the pair would not be returned to China and would only spend a further five months in jail because of time in pretrial detention.

The case aroused passions in Kazakhstan where Beijing's perceived persecution of Muslim minorities including ethnic Kazakhs has inspired resentment against the country's pro-China government.

Akhat said that protesters outside the courtroom in the remote northeastern town of Zaisan broke a door and hauled police out of the way in a bid to attend the hearing.

Several protesters were detained and taken away in police vans, the lawyer said.

Other recent cases involving Chinese ethnic Kazakhs seeking asylum in their historic homeland have ended with the Kazakh court freeing the defendants against a backdrop of public pressure.

But a high-ranking Kazakh security official's comment in December that Musakhan and Alimuly had "no chance" of remaining in Kazakhstan and would be returned to China in line with a bilateral agreement deepened concern over their fate.

The men said they had been held and beaten in jails in China prior to escaping across the border in October and feared they would be incarcerated again.

China has faced international condemnation for rounding up an estimated one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in internment camps in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Beijing initially denied the existence of the Xinjiang camps, but now says they are "vocational training centres" necessary to combat terrorism.

There are at least 1.5 million Kazakhs living in Xinjiang, the region's second largest Turkic group after the Uighurs.

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