In this city whose mosques bespeak its faith and whose crumbling tenement blocks are monuments to its Soviet past, puddles of blood-tinged water tell the latest chapter of Tashkent's history.
Soviet habits of secrecy die hard here, and officials are quick to sanitize the news just as the hoses have been hard at work washing away the ugly residue of three days of suicide bombs and gun battles. There was no live coverage of events; the violence was mentioned only briefly on the evening TV news.
But there's water on a road where two men blew themselves up, killing three police officers. Another puddle down the road marks the trail where police shot a woman in the legs; they couldn't stop her detonating a homemade bomb as she approached a bus.
PHOTO: AP
The hoses came out again to spray staircases and sidewalks where five bodies lay splayed across a sidewalk for hours amid drying pools of blood. The alleged terrorists died at a four-story apartment building in an hours-long gun battle.
In a burned-out building down the road, water was sprayed on walls riddled with bullet holes in apparently the heaviest fighting Tuesday.
And then there was just the little splash in the dirt by Hairniso Supiyeva's house in Kibray, a Tashkent suburb. That's where, according to Supiyeva, a female suicide bomber's head landed, the shrapnel from her bomb pitting holes in the blue metal gate.
The violence left at least 42 people dead and ushered the Uzbek capital into the company of Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta and other cities that have experienced the sudden blow of post-Sept. 11 mayhem.
As everywhere else, death struck at random -- outside a store called Children's World, where a child was among the fatalities Monday, and by the Chorsu bazaar, where blue-tiled domes mimic the architectural grandeur of the medieval conqueror Tamerlane.
Tashkent, ``Stone City'' in Uzbek, sits on a plain. Its more than 2 million people make it the fourth-largest city in the former Soviet Union. In 1966 an earthquake destroyed much of the city. In 1991 the Soviet Union died, and Tashkent became the capital of one of the five newly minted Central Asian republics.
An old town of mud streets and tightly packed houses evokes the legendary Silk Road. Islam is low-key here. People drink vodka and only very few mosques broadcast the call to prayer.
Uzbekistan has allied itself with the war on terrorism, allowing US troops to base themselves about 400 km from Tashkent. US soldiers and contractors sometimes turn up in the capital, but their presence is barely felt.
Stoic forbearance is bred into the Uzbeks. They look aged beyond their years by the fierce sun, and make do with what they have, their destinies once determined by feudal khans, then Soviet masters and now an unsure independence.
Supiyeva coped as best she could. With electricity, water and gas shut off after the fighting Tuesday, the 64-year-old woman built a fire in her yard and cooked the family dinner of plov -- the oily fried rice and mutton eaten across Central Asia.
On the streets, among left-over Soviet apartment blocks and single-family houses suddenly stricken by terrorism, the two Tashkents were on vivid display: Uzbek women in full-length robes and colored head kerchiefs, and Russians in skirts and slacks. Their languages were different -- Uzbek and Russian -- but they shared the same fear and anger.
Still, the stoicism occasionally broke as people voiced rare public outrage at Uzbek President Islam Karimov, the country's current and Soviet-era leader who has displayed little desire for democratic or economic reform.
"Why didn't Karimov come here to see the victims?" asked one woman.
With no live media coverage or officials giving any news conferences, rumors compounded the fear and anger.
At the end of the day, the official version of events finally made it to state-run TV.
The evening news, which distrustful Uzbeks cynically refer to as "the news of paradise," led with Karimov meeting the former Lithuanian president. Tuesday's violence merited only a brief statement.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
RSS