Families of hundreds killed in Uzbekistan when troops opened fire to quell protests buried their dead yesterday as witnesses told of bloody mayhem in which women and children were shot "like rabbits". In a single incident in Andijan on Friday, witnesses said soldiers had fired on a crowd including women and children and their own police comrades who were begging them not to shoot. Hundreds of bodies lay overnight outside the eastern town's School No. 15 after the massacre until they were removed in the early hours on Saturday, the witnesses, who did not wish to be named, said. Soldiers later moved in among "literally hundreds" of bodies, finishing off some of the wounded with a single bullet, said one witness to Friday's killings outside School No. 15. The two independent eyewitness accounts to Reuters, both by men who live nearby but who asked not to be identified, could not be independently verified. President Islam Karimov said Saturday he had forbidden the use of force against women, children and the elderly. Two days after an uprising in the mostly Muslim Central Asian state's Ferghana Valley, blood and body parts, hastily sprinkled with soil, still lay on the pavements, streets, and gutters in the center of this leafy town of 300,000 people.