Toll in Uzbekistan crackdown still in dispute

MOSCOW – The Uzbek government on Wednesday changed its account of how people died in last week’s government crackdown on protesters, saying that more than 100 civilians were killed when government troops clashed with thousands of demonstrators and armed militants in the eastern city of Andijon.

On Tuesday, the country’s top prosecutor, Rashid Kadyrov, said 169 people died in the clashes, including 32 law enforcement officers, some hostages and armed protesters. “Everyone who was killed had weapons,” Kadyrov claimed at a Tashkent news conference, with President Islam Karimov at his side.

On Wednesday, Uzbek Interior Minister Zakir Almatov told diplomats and journalists who were taken on a tightly controlled tour of Andijon that “bandits killed 100 civilians and another eight were killed by random bullets,” the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported.

Human rights activists and others in Andijon say 300 to 500 people died in last Friday’s clashes, most of them unarmed civilians shot by government troops.

Witnesses in Andijon have also told Western media that many armed militants were involved in the clashes.

“The authorities will never tell the truth,” said Elmira Khasanova, an independent journalist in Tashkent associated with Reporters Without Borders, an international association. “The intelligentsia doesn’t agree … that this was a terrorist act. We think that a cruel order was given to kill civilians.”