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The SCAT airline said the plane carried 15 passengers and five crew. The Kazakh Prosecutor-General's office said 21 people were aboard.

Officials said the plane, flying in from the northern city of Kokshetau, disappeared from radar view at around 13:13 p.m. local time (0713 GMT). The airline said the pilot was making a second approach through heavy fog when the plane crashed about five kilometers (3 miles) from the airport.

The Emergencies Ministry said the plane was a Bombardier CRJ200, a two-engine regional jet that can accommodate about 50 passengers.

SCAT said the cause for the crash will not be determined until flight recorder data are examined.

The General Prosecutor's Office said it is opening a criminal investigation into the airline.

Prime Minister Serik Akhmetov ordered the creation of a state commission to investigate the crash.

This is the second major aircraft accident recently in Kazakhstan. In December, 27 people died when an An-72 military plane crashed near the southern city of Shymkent during violent snowstorms.

SCAT, which is based in Shymkent, is banned from flying within the European Union. The company operates regional flights within Kazakhstan, a country of 16.5 million people spread across an area four times the size of Texas.

Only one airline in Kazakhstan, state-owned Air Astana, is authorized to fly to the EU.

The drawing was published on Sunday, when Britain marked Holocaust Memorial Day.

The affair, which drew passionate debate in Britain on Tuesday, seemed to offer a mirror image of controversies in recent years involving cartoons that Muslims found to be offensive.

In a message on Twitter on Monday, Mr. Murdoch wrote that the artist who drew the cartoon, Gerald Scarfe, "has never reflected the opinions of The Sunday Times. Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon."

The drawing showed Mr. Netanyahu holding a trowel and included the lines: "Israel elections. Will cementing the peace continue?" The wall in the cartoon was apparently a reference to the barrier Israel has built between itself and the West Bank.

Stephen Pollard, the editor of Britain's Jewish Chronicle weekly newspaper, said in a BBC radio segment on Tuesday that the timing of the cartoon was "grotesque." It reflected "the worst anti-Semitic blood libel," which was common in cartoons in Arabic newspapers in the Middle East, he said.

But, appearing on the same broadcast, Steve Bell, a cartoonist for The Guardian, responded in a heated discussion that when Mr. Scarfe depicted President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in a similarly confrontational light there had been "not a squeak" of criticism.

The debate also spread to Israel where columnist Anshel Pfeffer wrote on the Haaretz newspaper Web site. "Should The Sunday Times have not published the cartoon on International Holocaust Memorial Day? Only if one believes that is a day in which Israeli politicians have immunity from being caricatured."

Mr. Scarfe is one of Britain's best-known cartoonists and his works has appeared in The Sunday Times since 1967. The Jewish Chronicle quoted Mr. Scarfe as saying he "very much regrets" the timing the cartoon's publication. In a message to the newspaper, he "said that he had not been aware it was Holocaust Memorial Day," The Jewish Chronicle reported.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the main representative body for British Jews, said it had complained to the Press Complaints Commission, the body by which British newspapers regulate themselves.

Like, Mr. Pollard, the board said the cartoon "is shockingly reminiscent of the blood libel imagery more usually found in parts of the virulently anti-Semitic Arab press."

Initially, The Sunday Times defended its decision to publish the cartoon, British news reports said, saying it was "aimed squarely at Mr. Netanyahu and his policies, not at Israel, let alone at Jewish people. It appeared yesterday because Mr. Netanyahu won the Israeli election last week."

But Martin Ivens, the acting editor of The Sunday Times, said the newspaper would not countenance insults to the memory of Holocaust victims or blood libel, a term denoting medieval superstitions falsely accusing Jews of using the blood of children in rituals.

"The paper has long written strongly in defense of Israel and its security concerns, as have I as a columnist," he said in a statement published by the Press Association news agency. "We are, however, reminded of the sensitivities in this area by the reaction to the cartoon, and I will, of course, bear them very carefully in mind in future."

Mr. Ivens planned to meet British Jewish leaders on Tuesday to apologize in person for the cartoon.

Mr. Xi laid out some of the principles likely to shape Chinese diplomacy under him in a speech to the Communist Party's elite Politburo that balanced vows of commitment to peace with a warning that certain demands are sacrosanct to Beijing.

At the heart of that message was Mr. Xi's invocation of "core national interests," a sweeping and ill-defined term that he and other senior Chinese officials have used to refer to security and sovereignty interests that they say are not negotiable. These include quelling independence movements in Tibet and the far western region of Xinjiang and eventually bringing the island of Taiwan under Chinese sovereignty.

"We must adhere to the path of peaceful development, but can never abandon our legitimate interests, and can never sacrifice core national interests," Mr. Xi said at the meeting on Monday, according to an account published by the state-run Xinhua news agency on Tuesday.

"No foreign country should ever nurse hopes that we will bargain over our core national interests, and nor should they nurse hopes that we will swallow the bitter fruit of harm to our country's sovereignty, security and development interests," said Mr. Xi.

Mr. Xi's published comments did not mention China's quarrel with Japan over an outcrop of rocky islands in the East China Sea, or any other specific foreign policy issues. But his words could reinforce nationalist expectations in China and anxieties abroad that he will press territorial claims more determinedly than his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who remains state president until March, when the national parliament will install Mr. Xi in that post.

"Yes, it's a tougher policy, saying that we're not trading our core interests," said Shen Dingli, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Mr. Xi's comments were in the bounds of established Chinese policy, but he appears more willing to show an assertive position on territorial issues than his predecessors, said Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.

"These are the basic principles, just stated more clearly," Mr. Jin said. "China will be more resolute in safeguarding its interests."

"Now China's strength is greater and domestic audiences are more focused on foreign policy, hence the talk of resolute protection," Mr. Jin added.

During a visit to the United States a year ago, Mr. Xi also demanded respect for China's "core national interests." There has been controversy in Chinese policy circles in recent years over how to define core interests beyond the specific territorial issues involving Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. Starting in 2009, some senior officials began pressing a definition of those interests that covered broader territorial claims, while some policy advisers argued that expanding the concept could entangle Beijing in needless and costly disputes.

The months before and since Mr. Xi was appointed Communist Party leader in November have been overshadowed by the feud between China and Japan over the East China Sea islands, which the former calls the Diaoyu while the latter calls them the Senkaku. In September, torrid and sometimes violent protests spread across dozens of Chinese cities after the Japanese government said it had bought islands that were in private Japanese hands.

Japan has held the islands for more than a century. But China says it has legitimate title to them, and recently has sent government ships and planes to skirt near the islands and underscore that point. Earlier in January, tensions spiked when both countries sent fighter jets over the East China Sea at the same time.

China is also locked in disputes with southeast Asian countries, especially the Philippines and Vietnam, over Beijing's territorial claims in the South China Sea that span busy shipping lanes, fishing grounds and potentially valuable gas and oil reserves.

Mr. Xi, who is 59 years old and likely to lead China for the next decade, has urged Chinese military forces to focus on training for possible conflict and stamp out lax discipline and corruption.

But on Friday, he and a visiting Japanese politician from the governing coalition signaled that their governments want to try to keep in check tensions over the islands dispute. Mr. Xi, though, also stressed he was not softening Beijing's territorial demands.

"China will take the peaceful the path of peaceful development, and other countries must also take that path," Mr. Xi said in his speech to the Politburo.

The man blew himself up Tuesday morning when he was questioned by soldiers manning a checkpoint in the palace complex known as Villa Somalia, said Mohamed Ali, a police officer at the official residence in Mogadishu, the capital.

Villa Somalia has a large compound with several buildings and checkpoints. The bomber was four more checkpoints away from President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's home, Ali said. The president is said to be out of the country on state business. The checkpoint where the blast took place is near the home of Prime Minister's Abdi Farah Shirdon which is also in the compound, according to officials.

Two soldiers died and three others were wounded in the explosion, said Yusuf Abdi, a military officer at the palace.

Mohamud survived an assassination attempt on his second day in office in September when two suicide bombers blew themselves up while trying to gain access into a heavily guarded hotel serving as his temporary residence.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack but it falls into a pattern of previous attacks blamed on the al-Qaida-linked rebel group al-Shabab. The extremist group has been waging an insurgency against Somalia's United Nations-backed government.

Mohamud, 56, who was an academic and activist before becoming president, is expected to form the county's first functioning central government since 1991, when warlords overthrew longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

Since 2004, Somalia has been represented by a U.N.-approved leadership structure called the Transitional Federal Government that until recently only controlled small parts of Mogadishu. That government accomplished little, but since African Union and Somali troops pushed the al-Shabab extremists out of the capital in 2011 and most parts of the country they occupied in 2012, positive momentum new stability is building.

The international community is supporting Mohamud's government saying it's a step toward moving the country out of its failed-state status but that much more remains to be done in a country bloodied by two decades of war.

In a sign of progress, the United States last week officially recognized the Somali government for the first time since Barre's fall 1991.

Mohamud faces an uphill task unifying a fractious country in the face of the Islamist radicals' insurgency and rebuilding a bombed-out infrastructure, food security and institutions. Another challenge is fighting the endemic corruption that plagued previous governments.

For days, the office of the incoming President Park Geun-hye had warned Mr. Lee not to "abuse his presidential power" by granting presidential pardons in his last days in office. Doing so, it said, would "go against the will of the people."

In ignoring that appeal, Mr. Lee asserted on Tuesday that he was still the president.

"This is not an abuse of presidential authority," Mr. Lee was quoted as saying by his office during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, adding that the number of people pardoned under his five-year rule — 13,000 — was far smaller than those who had won presidential clemency under his predecessors. "It is carried out according to law and procedure," he added.

The highly unusual row between Mr. Lee and Ms. Park, both members of the governing Saenuri Party, rekindled a long-running controversy over a South Korean president's power to grant special amnesty.

In recent decades, every South Korean president has exercised that power more than once a year, freeing inmates or restoring the civil rights of ex-convicts, such as letting them run for political office. Such pardons were typically given ahead of national holidays, such as the Lunar New Year's Day, which falls on Feb. 10 this year, and affected as many as thousands of people at a time.

But those who traditionally have benefited also included several politicians, big businessmen and close associates of the president, some of whom had been convicted in high-profile corruption cases. That spawned a persistent complaint from civic groups and ordinary citizens that in South Korea that the corrupt yet politically connected escaped legal justice, helping foster persistent corruption among the country's political and business elite.

South Korean presidents, during their campaigns, had often warned that those convicted of corruption should not expect special pardons. But once elected, they invariably issued a special amnesty toward the end of their single five-year term, leading the political opposition to accuse them of giving their last favor to their allies before they left office.

Mr. Lee, who will hand over the presidency to Ms. Park on Feb. 25, continued that pattern when he approved special pardons for 55 people on Tuesday.

Although that was a modest number, it included Mr. Lee's longtime friend, the businessman Chun Shin-il and his close political ally and former Cabinet member Choi See-joong. Both of them were convicted of bribery and have finished less than half of their prison terms.

The amnesty also erased the criminal records of two other allies of Mr. Lee who were convicted of bribery but avoided prison terms: Park Hee-tae, a former National Assembly speaker, and Kim Hyo-jae, a former senior political affairs aide to Mr. Lee.

Ms. Park, like her predecessors, had, during her campaign, expressed concerns about the tendency of outgoing residents to grant special pardons, and those concerns were echoed Tuesday by her aides.

"Pushing ahead with pardoning those involved in irregularities and corruption will receive a national reproach," her spokesman, Yoon Chang-jung, said on Tuesday after the presidential pardons were announced. "President Lee should bear all responsibility."

The main opposition Democratic United Party raised suspicions that Ms. Park's criticism of Mr. Lee was insincere and was a political gambit aimed at shielding her from the public backlash over the controversial pardons. In fact, several other politicians pardoned on Tuesday included a close ally of Ms. Park.

"We are appalled by the brazen arrogance, self-righteousness and lack of communication that President Lee is demonstrating till his last day in office," the party's spokesman, Jung Sung-ho, said in a statement. "President-elect Park Geun-hye should be held responsible too for doing nothing to stop the pardons except uttering a few words of criticism."