Kyrgyz ethnic violence death toll hits 124

An Ethnik Uzbek holds his head in his hands as he stands beside the wreckage of his burned out home in Osh yesterday. Deadly gun battles raged in the Kyrgyzstan city of Osh where bodies littered the streets as ethnic violence escalated and Uzbekistan raced to cope with a massive refugee influx.Photo: AFP

At least 124 people have been killed and more than 1,685 wounded in spiralling ethnic violence in the south of the ex-Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan, the health ministry said yesterday.
The previous death toll stood at 117.
"The death toll as a result of the events in the Jalalabad and Osh regions has reached 124 people" since Thursday in running street battles between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, the ministry said.
Another 1,685 have been wounded in the violence, it added.
Officials in neighbouring Uzbekistan said tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbek refugees had fled across the border from Kyrgyzstan to escape the violence.
Some officials put the number at well over 100,000.
The provisional Kyrgyz government, which seized power in April riots, has so far failed to quell the violence.
It has given shoot-to-kill orders to police and military and called up all reservists in its efforts to stem bloodshed but is also begging for military help from Russia amid the spiralling violence.
Uzbekistan on Monday ordered its frontier closed to a mass exodus of refugees fleeing clashes between rival groups in Kyrgyzstan where government forces were accused of helping the slaughter of ethnic Uzbeks.
Gunfire rang out across the southern Kyrgyzstan city of Osh, where bodies littered the streets. More fighting was reported in the nearby city of Jalalabad. Scores are reported killed in three days of clashes.
With estimates of up to 100,000 people already inside Uzbekistan, the Central Asian state's Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Aripov said the border would be closed.
"Today we will stop accepting refugees from the Kyrgyz side because we have no place to accommodate them and no capacity to cope with them," he said.
He said Uzbekistan has registered 45,000 adult refugees from Kyrgyzstan and needs international humanitarian aid to cope. "If we have the ability to help them and to treat them of course we will open the border" again, he added.
KYRGYZ FORCES AIDED CLASHES
Uniformed Kyrgyz troops gave armed support to mobs attacking ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, according to refugees who fled the violence.
Bakhtiyor Sharipov, a 30-year-old officer in Kyrgyzstan's army, said he deserted his armoured unit in revulsion after watching his own troops gun down ethnic Uzbek civilians in the southern city of Osh.
"What I saw was not an army," Sharipov recounted to AFP at this Uzbek border post where he joined tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks who fled the bloodshed and poured into Uzbekistan.
"They were shooting at civilians of the Uzbek diaspora, working together with criminals. I left for that reason and crossed the border," said Sharipov, himself an ethnic Uzbek.
"The Kyrgyz defence ministry ordered us not to fire on civilians. But in Osh, military and police in uniform ignored this order and helped bandits to kill Uzbeks," he said.
Sharipov specifically charged that his commanding officer, a colonel in the Kyrgyzstan army whom he named as Kursand Asanov, allowed the troops to shoot.
Panicked refugees, who arrived by the hundreds every hour on Monday at this Uzbek border post, painted a terrifying picture of the killings in southern Kyrgyzstan.