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." |
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.