Sat, Apr 03, 2004 page5

• Uzbekistan steps up `terror' fight

  • AP
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  Authorities asked residents yesterday to watch out for suspicious behavior, in posters going up across the capital, while a rights group said a week of violence that has killed at least 44 people has sparked a renewed crackdown on Muslims who worship outside state-run mosques.

  "Dear compatriots! This is our common responsibility -- to protect peace in the country, the former calm life of children, women and the elderly," read the statements by the Tashkent city commission. "It is our civic duty to contribute to safeguarding security and maintaining tranquility in neighborhoods and residential areas."

  A spate of suicide bombings and other attacks starting Sunday in this tightly controlled Central Asian country have mostly targeted police, who have arrested an unknown number of suspects.

  

  An Uzbek police team patrol the streets in the area around the house where an Islamic terrorist killed himself during an attempt to arrest him in Tashkent on Thursday. This week's outbreak of violence in Uzbekistan has been linked to al-Qaeda, a top counterterrorism official said Thursday, the first time the Uzbek government has directly tied the attacks to the terror network headed by Osama bin Laden.

  PHOTO: AP

  Many of the week's 44 victims were militants killed in confrontations with government forces, including 20 alleged terrorists who officials said blew themselves up after they were cornered Tuesday. However, official accounts have contradicted officers and witnesses at the scene, who said some of the militants were killed in shootouts.

  Critics say it appears the government has broadened its crackdown to include religious dissidents who are not necessarily linked to violence.

  Human Rights Watch said in a statement Friday that at least 11 people who are mostly former religious prisoners and their relatives have been arrested and are being held incommunicado.

  "We are concerned that the recent arrests signal the launch of another intensification of the ongoing crackdown, similar to what happened after the Tashkent bombing in 1999," said Rachel Denber, acting executive director of the group's Europe and Central Asia Division.

  Those 1999 blasts that killed at least 16 people were blamed on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a terror group that fought US-led forces in Afghanistan.

  The government, which closely controls all media, has not been overly clear about which group it believes is behind the latest violence, but has linked it to the international al-Qaeda terror network.

  Uzbekistan previously has insisted the IMU has been vanquished. But a top anti-terror official said Thursday that the recent attacks were carried out by a member of the Islamic Wahhabi sect. In the past, Uzbeks have used the Wahhabi label to describe the IMU, and officials have said the explosive materials in this week's attacks were similar to those used in 1999.

  "What they called Wahhabis in the past was always the IMU," said Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the region.

  A Western diplomat in Tashkent said the IMU has devolved from a more military organization -- which carried out incursions across Central Asia from 1999 to 2001 -- to a cell-type structure, since it lost hundreds of fighters in battles with US-led forces in northern Afghanistan in 2001.

  In the latest incident, police said a woman detonated a bomb in a two-story apartment building Thursday in the central Bukhara region, killing one person and wounding herself.

  She was hospitalized in critical condition, according to a police duty officer who declined to give her name. Police said a man also was killed, but Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency reported the woman's daughter was killed.

  Ilya Pyagay, the Interior Ministry's deputy anti-terrorism chief, told reporters that those behind the turmoil, including some fugitives, were followers of the strict Wahhabi strain of Islam believed to have inspired Osama bin Laden.

  "These are Wahhabis who belong to one of the branches of the international al-Qaida terror group," he said Thursday.

  The number of Wahhabis in Central Asia is believed to be small, said Acacia Shields, Central Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch and author of a report on religious oppression in Uzbekistan.

  She said the Uzbek regime uses the Wahhabi label loosely -- even to refer to someone who simply studies the Koran at home.

  "The government is now, it appears, trying to conflate Saudi-style Wahhabism -- which has been linked to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda -- with its own misuse of the term and thereby suggest peaceful Muslim dissidents in Uzbekistan are just like al-Qaeda," Shields said.

  A wanted poster seeking eight suspects was displayed at Tash-kent's airport Friday, including four men from the capital or surrounding region, three men from Bukhara and a woman for whom no further details were given. It said they were being sought in bombings Monday, but it wasn't clear if any of the suspects had already been arrested.

  "The causes here in Uzbekistan are extreme repression and deepening poverty caused by the Karimov regime," British Ambassador Craig Murray said.
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