HUNDREDS were killed in a military crackdown in Uzbekistan after anti-government protests turned violent. Uzbek President Islam Karimov has blamed the situation on Islamic radicals. According to local witnesses, however, the soldiers fired indiscriminately into the crowd and about 300 were killed dead. Local doctors and human rights activists are saying that up to 500 have been killed and 2000 injured. However, on Tuesday, an opposition leader said her party had compiled a list of 745 dead bodies. Certainly, the official figures are much lower. However, there has been no confirmation of the accurate number of the dead. Witnesses also said that militants had fired at the police. The beginning of the bloodshed began early Friday, when demonstrations which had been carried out for several weeks over a trial of 23 local businessmen started to intensify. Prosecutors had accused the men of belonging to an outlawed Islamic group, but their supporters confirmed that the charges were fabricated. After armed supporters for the accused marched towards a local prison to free them, along with some other 2,000 prisoners, the military moved into the city that by then was overwhelmed with mass anti-government protest. On Sunday, soldiers and tanks were distributed on the streets of eastern Uzbek city. The streets were mostly empty of people and cars, with the exception of the morgue, where relatives came to look for missing loved ones. An accurate death number from the violence has been impossible to discern, as soldiers guarding the city morgue and hospitals denied entry to reporters amid a general media clampdown by the autocratic government. Karimov, a 67-year-old Soviet-era leader in a state of 24 million who is backed by both Moscow and Washington, has accused Islamic extremists for the violence and denied that the soldiers were given the order to shoot. He stated that soldiers fired only after being attacked by the protesters. He accused the Islamic extremists of seeking "to unite the Muslims and establish a caliphate," adding that their aim is to "overthrow the constitutional regime". Karimov described the protest as a conspiracy made by the Islamic Liberalisation Party. However, this accusation has been totally denied by Omran Waheed the spokesman of the Liberalisation Party who lives in London. "This violence is the result of Karimov's oppressive regime that tortures and imprisons thousands of innocent people," Waheed said. He asserted that the party is very active in Uzbekistan, however, and that it will overthrow Karimov's regime through peaceful means. Many of those who had demonstrated said it was poverty and unemployment -- rather than political or religious demands -- that had led them to protest. As for the international reactions, the United States has been mild in its criticism as Uzbekistan has a US military base and is considered an alley in Washington's war on terror. The US government has called on both sides to work out their differences peacefully. The Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his "extreme concern" over the danger of instability in central Asia. The European Union stated that one of the reasons behind the eruption of violence is the government ignorance of human rights. The United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said there had been "a clear abuse of human rights" in Uzbekistan. Straw added that the situation was "serious" and called for more transparency from the Uzbek government.
