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Uzbekis fear more violence amid tight security

Tension simmered in eastern Uzbekistan yesterday amid heightened security and fears of more violence, days after a military crackdown that witnesses say killed hundreds of people in the autocratic ex-Soviet state.

Uzbek authorities were likely to carry out mass arrests of protesters who staged the uprising bloodily suppressed by troops at the weekend, a leading human-rights campaigner said yesterday.

The rebellion in Andizhan on Friday, sparked by the trial of 23 Muslim businessmen and blamed by President Islam Karimov on Islamic extremists, was put down by security forces in the bloodiest chapter in the country's post-Soviet history.

"One can now only expect massive arrests and the elimination of those opposing the regime," human-rights campaigner Saidzhakhon Zainabitdinov, of the Uzbek rights group Appeal, said in Andizhan.

He has estimated troops killed up to 500 people.

Gunshots were reported overnight in Kara-Suu, a town on the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border. Kyrgyz authorities reported having detained up to 150 refugees trying to cross into Kyrgyzstan, while the eastern city of Andizhan, the epicenter of the unrest, remained under heavy security.

"There are reports coming to me according to which there were gunshots in Kara-Suu during the night," a foreign diplomat said by phone.

"The situation there is quite tense," the diplomat said.

After soldiers trying to disperse the anti-government rally in Andizhan fired into the crowd, reportedly killing several hundred people, scores of Uzbeks have sought to cross into Kyrgyzstan.

A refugee camp set up across the border was reported to be holding some 900 people late on Sunday.

To stem the flow, Kyrgyz authorities have increased border patrols along the Uzbek border.

A border-guard spokeswoman said temporary checkpoints had been set up in the Kara-Suu region "with the aim of preventing destructive elements from entering the country."

Uzbek authorities admitted that the death toll from Friday's clashes in Andizhan was higher than the previously reported figure of 30.

Gulbahor Turdiyeva, chief of the local Animokur non-governmental organization, said she had seen 500 bodies stored at a school in Andizhan and another 100 in a nearby construction college.

In Andizhan, terrified and dejected residents attempted to resume their lives amid such reports and heightened security, as police and troops continued to patrol the city's streets.

Groups of people with missing relatives continued to queue in front of the city's morgue, looking for their missing loved ones.

Amid a national media clampdown, federal authorities have been preventing reporters from entering the city and yesterday detained three photographers for several hours before releasing the men.

Uzbekistan's authoritarian President Islam Karimov has blamed Islamic groups for fomenting the unrest and said soldiers fired only after being shot at.

Although human-rights groups have accused Uzbekistan's autocratic government of systematic use of torture in its police stations and prisons, Western governments' criticism has been muted because Tashkent is considered an ally in Washington's "war on terror," hosting a US military base on its territory.

In a departure, the UK slammed the violence as "a clear abuse of human rights," the strongest international rebuke of the clashes yet and London's harshest criticism of Uzbekistan in years.
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