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Cohen's www.borat.kz website has been shut down by the authority which governs the country's .kz domain.

'We've done this so he can't badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name,' Nurlan Isin, president of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies, told Reuters. 'He can

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go and do whatever he wants at other domains.'

He added that the site had also broken association rules as it was registered using false names.

Cohen, who is Jewish, said (in the guise of Borat): I have no connection to Mr Cohen and fully support my government's position to sue this Jew.'

Cohen shot to fame as Ali G, a clever parody of white men who think they is black. Borat, on the other hand, is an unsubtle caricature of a sexist and racist TV reporter. The portrayal borders on xenophobia - some would say it is outright racist - though Cohen has defended it as satire.

Kazakhstan Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev described Cohen's recent Borat performance presenting the MTV Europe Music Awards as 'utterly unacceptable, being a concoction of bad taste and ill manners which is completely incompatible with ethics and civilised behaviour'. He threatened possible legal action to prevent similar 'pranks' in future.