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500 die in Uzbekistan unrest
A military crackdown in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan left hundreds dead as President Islam Karimov on Saturday blamed Islamic extremists for the violence and denied responsibility for the bloodshed.
"Nope. Nope. Wudn't me."
As many as 500 people may have been killed when Uzbek troops on Friday fired on thousands of protesters and clashed with rebels, a local human rights campaigner said on Saturday. "The total number of deaths could reach 500 from both sides," Saidzhakhon Zainatbitdinov, the local head of Uzbek human rights group Appeal, told Reuters by phone from the eastern town. At least 40 to 50 bodies littered the streets and troops roamed the city in armoured vehicles, backed by helicopters, in search of gunmen, while witnesses spoke of up to 300 dead and accused soldiers of firing indiscriminately. Hundreds of people braved sporadic gunfire to gather in protest. "Down with Karimov who fires on his own people", the crowd shouted. Although no independent verification was immediately possible, several witnesses referred to seeing hundreds of corpses.

Lutfula Shamsutdinov, a member of the Apelyatsiya human rights group in Andijan, said that he had witnessed soldiers "loading 300 bodies into three trucks and a bus in the street opposite the cinema". The claim was impossible to verify and access to the hospital blocked. In the capital Tashkent, Karimov said only about 30 people had died. He described the turmoil as part of a plot by the outlawed Hizbut Tahrir, an Islamic group, to seize power in the ex-Soviet republic. Meanwhile, some 500 Uzbek refugees broke through a closed border into Kyrgyzstan on Saturday, fleeing violence in Andijan, Kyrgyz authorities said. President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone on Saturday with his counterpart in Uzbekistan and expressed Russia's "serious concern" about the danger of instability in former Soviet Central Asia, the Kremlin said. The European Commission also voiced concern at the escalation of violence in Uzbekistan, but said the government's disregard for human rights was partly to blame.
Posted by: Fred 2005-05-15
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=119175