Casualty Toll in Ethnic Clashes in 2 Soviet Republics May Reach 800

As many as 800 people may have died in ethnic clashes last month along the border between the Soviet Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, a Soviet newspaper reported Tuesday.

Previously, Soviet authorities had said 148 people died in fighting near the Kirghiz town of Osh on the border between the two republics.

But police Maj. Gen. A. M. Kotlyarov told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that about 800 people could not be accounted for, the report said.

Many were thought to have been wounded in the fighting, then carried by relatives into the surrounding mountains. Those who died from their wounds were buried without notification to Soviet authorities, the newspaper said.

“The scale of the crimes and their cruelty surpasses those committed in Fergana (in Uzbekistan), Azerbaijan and Armenia,” said the major, referring to ethnic clashes in other republics that have claimed hundreds of lives.

Tension remains high on the border, the government newspaper Izvestia said Monday. A state of emergency is in effect in the town of Jalalabad, where a 20-year-old Uzbek was killed over the weekend.

The suspected killers are in custody, Izvestia reported, but crowds of angry Uzbeks took to the streets demanding that more members of their ethnic group be included in law enforcement and KGB bodies, it said.