Bodies buried in Uzbekistan amid confusion over death toll

ANDIJAN, Uzbekistan -- A truck drove up early Tuesday and left 37 corpses wrapped in white shrouds. The bodies were buried, under police guard, in an empty field on the hills overlooking this eastern Uzbek city. Who the dead were, no one here knows.

Five people who died in Friday's violence already were buried by workers at the Bogu Shamol cemetery, where by local tradition relatives place overturned teapots or cups used by the deceased atop the knee-high hump of earth covering their final resting place.

There were no such personal touches at the graves some 50 yards away from the small cemetery set on hills south of the city, where splashes of wild red poppies grow in the dry grass. Instead, the 37 graves were marked with small numbered plaques -- some buried in twos, some alone -- with the dirt leveled flat with the ground. Eleven other graves sat empty.

Days after the outbreak of violence in Andijan, the fourth-largest city in this Central Asian U.S.-allied nation, there remained big discrepancies in the death tolls given by the government, activists and witnesses.

Uzbekistan's top prosecutor said Tuesday that 169 people -- 137 "terrorists" and 32 troops -- were dead. But after speaking with relatives of the missing, an opposition group claimed to have tallied 745 killed, most of them civilians.

Khusanbey Rakhimov, cemetery caretaker, said the government workers first started digging the separate graves Saturday, a day after the government put down a mass protest in Andijan that followed a jailbreak and assaults on the military and police.

At 7 a.m. Tuesday, the truck arrived, filled with bodies covered in white in accordance with Muslim custom. Some 15 workers from the city morgue performed the burials -- not the usual cemetery workers. They were supervised by four guards, Rakhimov said.

"They didn't give the names" of the dead, he said, adding that officials told him only that the bodies were of young men.

After their work was done, the authorities left and didn't say when they might be back to fill the other empty graves.

At the main Andijan morgue, a crowd of a dozen plainclothes security personnel refused to let journalists pass to speak to forensic experts or inquire about the burials at the Bogu Shamol cemetery. There were no crowds of relatives outside waiting to collect bodies, with one family there shying away from speaking to reporters.

Across town, residents spoke of bodies being held in schools. One local doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, had said she saw 500 bodies at a school at the scene of one of the earlier clashes. But a physical education teacher at the school, who also didn't give his name, said Tuesday there had only been "four or five" bodies there.

Workers at a construction college across the street, where the doctor said she had seen 100 more bodies, refused to let journalists inside.

A woman living next door said she had seen three trucks remove 30 to 40 dead from the scene, and that neighbors had even found a couple of people who had apparently died while hiding in a sauna.

One woman who gave her name as Galina Alexeyevna said she watched the clashes from her window but didn't know who fired first. As the injured ran into courtyards screaming for help, residents were afraid to leave their homes. She said doctors later arrived to help the wounded in the street, which remained stained with blood Tuesday.

At the city's old cemetery, filled with typical Soviet-style marble grave markers emblazoned with pictures of the deceased, workers said they had buried three people who died in the violence. Another small cemetery outside the city center had five fresh graves with space for one other woman whose body was still being sought by her family.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday in the capital, Tashkent, President Islam Karimov dismissed the claims of hundreds of deaths.

"Let's count the number of graves tomorrow," he said, apparently referring to a government-organized trip to Andijan for foreign media and diplomats set for Wednesday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice again appealed to Uzbekistan's government to open its political system and to reform.

"Nobody is asking any government to deal with terrorists," she said of a bloody clash between government forces and protesters.

At a State Department news conference Tuesday, she stressed U.S. concern with the country's human rights record and said she hoped the government "would be very, very open in understanding what has happened here."

Rice said innocent people had lost their lives and "that is always a cause for concern."

In the border town of Korasuv, Islamic leaders claimed that all police and other officials had fled, and they pledged to fight the authorities.

"In many cities around this area, and even in Kyrgyzstan, we have support. These people are also Muslims and they also stand for justice," Bakhtiyor Rakhimov told The Associated Press.

More than 500 Uzbek refugees, including 96 women and 21 children, have crossed into Kyrgyzstan near the Uzbek village of Teshik Tosh.

Some at the tent camp said they were fired on by Uzbek troops, and that at least six refugees were killed.

"We raised our hands, shouted that we are unarmed, but they kept firing," said Khabibullo Rakhimberdiyev.

Kyrgyz officials have indicated the refugees could be sent home quickly, but the refugees shuddered at the thought of returning to Uzbekistan.

"We demand that an international court take it up," said Abdusalom Karimov, 37. "If the world wants to know the truth about it, that must be done."

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Associated Press writers Kadyr Toktogulov in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Bagila Bukharbayeva in Kara Darya, Kyrgyzstan, contributed to this report.