Uzbeks fled for Kyrgyzstan as hundreds killed in clashes

Thousands of terrified Uzbeks fled for the Kyrgyzstan border on Saturday after burning a government building and attacking border guards, but hundreds angrily returned to the square where police fired on demonstrators to put down an uprising against country’s authoritarian US-allied leader. Human rights monitor said about 200 people were killed.

Some 4,000 Uzbeks fled to the border with neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, seeking asylum. Kyrgyz border guards were awaiting a government decision on whether to allow them in, said Gulmira Borubayeva, a spokeswoman for Kyrgyzstan’s border guard service. A move to shelter the refugees could badly strain Kyrgyzstan’s relations with Karimov’s government.

The unrest was triggered when protesters freed 2,000 accused Islamic militants in a brazen jail break overnight Friday and held a massive demonstration against economic conditions under the iron-fisted rule of President Islam Karimov.

Uzbek president Islam Karimov said 10 government troops and “many more” protesters were killed but refused to be more specific. He spoke at a news conference in the capital Tashkent a day after the unprecedented clashes in his tightly controlled country, which he has lot I since before the 1991 Soviet collapse.

In Andijan, hundreds of protesters gathered at the square, displaying the bodies of six people killed in Friday’s bloodshed and tearfully denouncing the government.

“Our women and children are dying,” said Daniyar Akbarov, 24, who claimed to have seen at least 300
people killed in the violence.

Earlier, soldiers loaded scores of bodies of those killed onto four trucks and a bus after blocking friends and relatives from collecting them, witnesses said.

Lutfulo Shamsutdinov, the head of the Independent Human Rights Organisation of Uzbekistan, said he saw about 200 victims being loaded onto trucks near the square in Andijan.

Another witness who declined to be named said “many, many dead bodies” were stacked up by a school near the square.

A group of foreign journalists was detained early on Saturday and told to leave the city immediately.

The White House yesterday declined to comment, although press secretary Scott McClellan on Friday urged both the government and demonstrators to “exercise restraint.”