Uzbeks bury dead after troops fire on protesters

ANDIZHAN, Uzbekistan, Monday (Reuters) Families of hundreds killed in Uzbekistan when troops opened fire to quell protests buried their dead as witnesses told of bloody mayhem in which women and children were shot "like rabbits".

In a single incident in Andizhan on Friday, witnesses said soldiers had fired on a crowd including women and children and their own police comrades who were begging them not to shoot.

Hundreds of bodies lay overnight outside the eastern town's School No. 15 after the massacre until they were removed in the early hours on Saturday, the witnesses, who did not wish to be named, said.Islam Karimov, autocratic president of the mainly Muslim Central Asian state, said troops were given no order to fire in Andizhan. He blamed the violence on rebels belonging to the outlawed Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Hizb ut-Tahrir denied involvement.

A Russian news agency, meanwhile, reported Uzbek troops had fired on civilians trying to flee into neighbouring Kyrgyzstan to escape the violence in their homeland. Uzbek troops moved in on protesters on Friday after armed rebels freed comrades being held in jail during their trial for religious extremism.

They took 10 police hostage and occupied Andizhan's local government building backed by several thousand sympathisers.

"They shot at us like rabbits," a boy in his late teens said, recalling the horror of troops rampaging through the town square where some 3,000 protesters had rallied to support the rebels.

Two days after the uprising in Uzbekistan's Ferghana Valley, blood and body parts could still be seen on sidewalks and in gutters in the centre of this leafy city of 300,000 people.

The United States, for whom Karimov is a close ally in the war on terrorism after providing Washington with an airbase in 2001, has urged the conflicting sides to show restraint. It says political change in the tightly controlled ex-Soviet state should come only through peaceful means.