Death toll, blame disputed in Uzbekistan violence

MOSCOW --The Uzbek government and its critics engaged in a fierce verbal battle yesterday over last week's bloody crackdown against thousands of protesters and armed militants in the eastern city of Andijon.

The country's prosecutor general, Rashid Kadyrov, at a news conference in Tashkent, the capital, rebutted numerous accounts from Andijon that unarmed residents who had joined the protests were among the dead.

''A number of hostages were killed, including three women and two minors," Kadyrov said in comments reported by the Russian news agency Interfax. ''Law enforcement agencies did not shoot at peaceful civilians. Everyone who was killed had weapons." He said 169 people had died, including 32 law enforcement officers.

Human rights activists, however, continued to place the death toll in Andijon at 300 to 500, and some said there were many additional deaths elsewhere in the region during the weekend.

President Islam Karimov, speaking at the same news conference, attacked foreign media coverage of the clashes in Andijon.

''The large-scale media campaign is nothing but an attempt to anticipate results of an official investigation, draw a picture that would make an imprint on people's minds, and claim that Uzbekistan has a tyranny and despots who execute civilians," Karimov said in comments reported by the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

Nigara Khidoyatova, head of the Free Peasants party, an opposition group not formally registered as a political party, said in a telephone interview from Tashkent that her organization's supporters were assembling a list of people killed in the unrest in Andijon and other nearby parts of eastern Uzbekistan. They had counted 745 people dead, including 203 people shot in Pakhtabad on Saturday, she said.

''People feel hatred toward that regime," Khidoyatova said. ''So when all the funeral ceremonies are over, the people there will mobilize themselves for a fight. That will be the beginning of the end of Karimov's regime."

The claims of both parties could not be verified. Eyewitness accounts from Andijon, and reports from correspondents with Western wire services, suggested that many unarmed residents who joined the protests were killed. Eyewitnesses told Western media, including the Los Angeles Times, that many armed militants participated in the clashes.

There has been no confirmation of a major clash in Pakhtabad, though such rumors persist. Andrei Babitsky, a Russian reporter for US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who visited the Pakhtabad area on Monday, said in a telephone interview that he was convinced no such incident had occurred in that town.

Friday's events in Andijon included a predawn assault on a prison by armed fighters who freed inmates, including 23 prominent local businessmen who were on trial for allegedly being Islamic extremists. By all accounts, most of those killed died later in the day, when troops retook a government building seized by militants.

At that time, eyewitnesses said, troops fired on crowds of thousands of protesters, including some who were armed. Religious ''extremism," although ill defined, is illegal in Uzbekistan. The law has been used to clamp down on fundamentalist Muslim groups operating outside the system of state-supported mosques.

The 23 businessmen, who are well respected in Andijon, had set up an Islamic charity. Human rights organizations had condemned their trial. Some observers suggested that they may have been targeted for prosecution partly because they set up the charity, which the government may have viewed as a challenge to its authority.

Khidoyatova said she did not know who organized the attack on the prison. ''The attack itself was done secretly, and how it was done is not clear for us," she said. ''It was really strange, because it was well organized, all the prison guards were shot, and no one survived. Certainly, there is a possibility that it was a provocation. . . . I don't think that it was the relatives of prisoners who did it."

At the Tashkent news conference, Karimov responded to a statement Monday by State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, who condemned ''the indiscriminate use of force against unarmed civilians." Karimov declared that Boucher ''should apply the same principles to himself and his country if you take into account those wars the US government takes part in."

The United States maintains a military base in Uzbekistan that is used to support its operations in Afghanistan, and the Bush administration considers this Central Asian country of 26 million an important ally.

Yesterday, the streets of Andijan remained stained with blood, and security was tight. Armored vehicles guarded approaches to official buildings and troops in combat gear watched from behind concrete barricades.

Morgue workers buried 37 bodies in graves marked only with numbered plates near a cemetery on hills surrounding the city. Under guard of four soldiers, the workers didn't tell the head of the cemetery the identity of the bodies, wrapped in white shrouds, other than saying they were young men.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.