MOSCOW — Thousands of people fleeing a bloody crackdown against protests in an eastern Uzbek city gathered Saturday in a nearby border town where rioting erupted amid fears of another assault by government troops.
Police stations, tax offices, the prosecutor's office and the customs terminal were set ablaze in the town of Korasuv, on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported. About 5,000 people had fled there Saturday from Andijon, 30 miles to the west, it said. Hundreds more fled to at least one other border-crossing site.
The violence in Korasuv was apparently triggered, at least in part, by anger that the border had been officially closed. Many residents have relatives on the other side, and some people fleeing Andijon were determined to escape from Uzbekistan.
Uzbek troops and police in Andijon fired into crowds of thousands of protesters Friday, which included armed militants and unarmed civilians. Human rights activists in Andijon put the death toll there at 300 to 500. This morning, a doctor told Associated Press that she had seen about 500 corpses laid out at a school guarded by soldiers.
In the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, President Islam Karimov accused Islamic extremists of staging a revolt and told reporters his troops were forced to open fire on "criminals" who had seized a government building. Karimov said 10 government troops and "many more" militants died, and at least 100 people were wounded in the fighting. He gave no figures on the number of civilians killed.
Karimov denied that his troops shot innocent civilians. "In Uzbekistan, nobody fights against women, children or the elderly," he said.
Witnesses in Andijon said elderly people, women and children were among the protesters as well as among those killed.
The clashes in Uzbekistan follow the March upheaval in Kyrgyzstan, where protests that started in Osh, across the border from Andijon, led to the ouster of President Askar A. Akayev within weeks.
Many of the frightened people in Korasuv on Saturday were attempting to cross the border, which lies along a small river.
At various sites, hundreds of people succeeded in making it into Kyrgyzstan, while hundreds more who got past Uzbek border guards were stopped on the Kyrgyz side, Itar-Tass reported.
