Bloodshed in Uzbekistan
Updated on 13 May 2005
The government of the repressive former Soviet republic, Uzbekistan, says its troops have cleared an area where thousands of people had earlier demonstrated.
Reports suggest many died in the clashes in the central Asian country.
Reports suggest nine people were killed and dozens wounded in clashes between the soldiers and the protesters who were demanding the release of 23 prominent businessmen who are on trial for alleged links to Islamic extremists.
It is the latest outbreak of violence in the eastern city of Andijan.
Still photographs are all we've got so far. In the hours after the jailbreak, protesters torched cars and a theatre while the rebels, who had sprung around 4,000 prisoners from Andijan jail, occupied a government building and took local police hostage. Nine bodies lay in pools of blood in the streets.
By midday, thousands had gathered in the main square in support of the as yet unidentified rebels; after Uzbek troops opened fire, leaving more dead and injured, many of these people scattered and fled.
Uzbek state television at first maintained normal programming; later it announced there had been violence in Andijan but it didn't run any footage.
Elsewhere in the remnants of Soviet empire, revolution has of late proved contagious.
Elsewhere in the remnants of Soviet empire, revolution has of late proved contagious. But the Uzbek President Islam Karimov - a particularly repressive brand of ex-Communist autocrat - will be in no mood to see his republic go the way of Georgia, Ukraine and next door Kyrgyzstan.
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray told Channel 4 News: "The Karimov regime has a completely abysbmal human rights record.
"There are thousands of political and religious prisoners, the use of torture is widespread they target anyone who is a political dissident and paint them a religious extremist which in the majority of cases they are not."
Karimov has told the US it is all part of the war against terrorism.
Andijan's a secular town in the east, just over the border from Osh, cradle of the Kyrgyz uprising in March. President Karimov, who has reportedly flown down there will want to stop protest spreading into Uzbekistan's Muslim heartland.
It's in this economically destitute region that opposition to him is strongest - mostly because it's here he's really clamped down on Muslims who don't toe the line of state-sponsored Islam.
Before the rebellion, there'd been peaceful protests for months in Andizhan over the trial of 23 Muslim businessmen accused of being Islamic extremists.
Bombings in the capital last year were blamed on a militant Islamist group - and because such groups do exist, it's allowed Islam Karimov to rule with an iron fist, crushing any form of opposition be it democratic, Muslim or just ordinary long-suffering Uzbeks who are beginning to sense they've lived with a despot too long.
