Uzbekistan death toll up to 500, campaigner says

ANDIZHAN, Uzbekistan - Uzbeks prepared on Sunday to bury more of the people killed when troops fired on protesters and rebels in the eastern town of Andizhan.

Up to 500 people may have died in Friday's violence in the tightly-controlled Central Asian country, a human rights campaigner said, a casualty toll which would make it the bloodiest incident in the state's post-Soviet history.

Russian state-run television showed men dragging dead bodies away while women wept. Some of the town's residents say many more bodies are being stored in the hospital and clinic, waiting to be removed.

"The tragedy happened because life is so unbearably difficult. There are not enough jobs and people are outraged," one man, who declined to give his name, said.

The autocratic president, Islam Karimov, in power since 1989 in the mainly-Muslim country, said on Saturday that 10 police and troops had been killed and a higher number of rebels.

He gave no figure for the number of dead civilians.

Karimov accused the outlawed Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir of being behind the violence in his country, an ally in the US war on terrorism. Hizb ut-Tahrir denied starting the trouble.

The United States backed mass protests that overthrew established leaderships in other ex-Soviet states, such as last year's "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine and Georgia's "Rose Revolution" the previous year.

But analysts say Washington's strategic interest in Uzbekistan, which provided the United States with an air base from which to launch its military effort in Afghanistan in 2001, may make it hard for it to support popular resistance to Karimov.

Andizhan's streets were heavily patrolled by armed police and soldiers, backed up by plain-clothes security officers. Armoured vehicles moved slowly around the town and roads were blocked by trucks and buses.

Fears of further violence in the area -- just across the border from the Kyrgyz city of Osh which saw some of the violent protests in March that led to the ousting of President Askar Akayev -- have prompted some Uzbeks to try to flee the country.

Around 500 refugees broke through the border into Kyrgyzstan, closed on Friday because of the unrest, and set up a camp. Thousands of other locals massed at the border, many simply wanting to visit relatives on the Uzbek side as usual.

Uzbekistan is one of the world's leading cotton exporters, produces gold and has some oil and gas reserves. But its largely state-controlled economy has failed to attract investment.

Rights groups say there are at least 6000 religious and political prisoners in Uzbekistan, where only state-sponsored Islam is allowed, and that torture is widely used.

- REUTERS