Foreign Ties Cited in Uzbek Violence

A string of bombings and clashes with police this week in Uzbekistan was the work of a group with foreign ties, the chief prosecutor of the Central Asian country said Friday.

Ten police officers, 33 suspected Islamic militants and four civilians -- including three children -- were killed in the series of incidents that began Sunday night when 10 people died in an explosion in the central western region of Bukhara, Prosecutor General Rashid Kadyrov said at a news conference in Tashkent, the capital.

The 10 who died in the initial blast were terrorists whose explosives blew up prematurely, authorities said. Suicide bombings and clashes between suspected militants and police followed over the next several days, injuring 35 people, Kadyrov said.

“Investigators have obtained reliable evidence that the series of terrorist attacks were committed by the same criminal group and were organized and controlled by a single center. Most of its members underwent training outside the country,” he said in comments reported by the Russian news agency Interfax. “This gives grounds to assume that the terrorist attacks committed in Uzbekistan were orchestrated by international terrorist organizations.”

President Bush telephoned Uzbek President Islam Karimov on Friday morning to express condolences. “The president reaffirmed our commitment to continue working closely with Uzbekistan ... to win the war on terrorism,” said White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

At his news conference, Kadyrov did not name any group suspected in the attacks, but authorities have said that they suspect the bombers had ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

“The law enforcement agencies are taking active measures to hunt down all the people culpable of the terrorist attacks,” Kadyrov said.

Seven of the 33 militants who died were women, Kadyrov said. Authorities have detained at least 19 suspects, including four women, he added. Weapons and ammunition were seized from the suspects, including 55 suicide-bomber belts, 72 plastic containers filled with an explosive mixture of aluminum powder and ammonium nitrate, and more than 2 tons of chemicals for making bombs, he said. The weapons included seven Kalashnikov assault rifles, 11 handguns and two grenades, he said.

Human-rights activists in Uzbekistan said the government was using the anti-terrorist sweep to detain people viewed with suspicion for other reasons.

Police are carrying out “arbitrary detentions” of “people who are on the government’s list of suspicious people,” Acacia Shields, senior researcher on Central Asia for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview from Tashkent. People formerly imprisoned on charges of religious extremism and the relatives of current or former prisoners were being held, she said.

“These are people who were never charged with violence in the past and it’s not clear that they’re being charged with violence now,” she said.

Human Rights Watch has documented the detentions of 12 such people in the last few days, of whom five were released, she said.

“Those five included three children ages 5 to 8 and two women, one of whom is mentally disabled,” she said. “The other woman said they were told by the police, ‘Your whole family is on the list. You are Wahhabis, and we will destroy you.’ ” Wahhabism is the austere fundamentalist sect of Islam common in Saudi Arabia.

Some observers say the beliefs of many Al Qaeda members are influenced by Wahhabism. In much of the former Soviet Union, the word is used to describe any Islamic militant opposed to government authority. In Uzbekistan the word is often used with a pejorative meaning to describe religious fundamentalists.

Talib Yakubov, chairman of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, said in a telephone interview from Tashkent that authorities were trying to use the violence to get Western governments to overlook human-rights abuses and the failure to implement democratic reforms.

Yakubov said the country’s security forces could have organized suicide bombings to make the terrorist threat seem real.

“We know how easy it is to prepare such people by doping them up with drugs, putting belts with explosives around their waists and then detonating those charges with the help of a remote control,” he said.

The government, he charged, wants to send the West a message: “What kind of democratic reforms and human rights can we think about now, when we have our hands full fighting all these horrible terrorists who kill innocent people and police officers in broad daylight?”

While insisting that he did not believe that opponents of the government were responsible for the violence, Yakubov indicated that most people seemed to believe the attacks were genuine.

“The most paradoxical thing is that many ordinary people in Uzbek society actually approve of these attacks, although they would never do anything like that themselves,” he said. “The years of Karimov’s rule have driven the people of Uzbekistan to such a condition that they can no longer tolerate this regime, and when they see something that looks like someone is trying to fight against this regime, they only acclaim such actions.”

Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.