Uzbeks accused of torture in wake of massacre
Nick Paton Walsh in Tashkent
Tuesday September 20, 2005
The Guardian
The government of Uzbekistan has launched an unprecedented crackdown in the wake of the Andijan massacre, with a series of arrests and torture being used to extract confessions, human rights groups will say today.
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Rights groups have said that up to 700 people were shot dead, but the government has maintained that 187 were killed. The 15 suspects are charged with murder, mass unrest and attempting a coup - charges that carry the death penalty.
The HRW report says 4,500 massacre survivors have been arrested. It adds that the crackdown is aimed not only at preventing further uprisings but also "rewriting the history" of the events on May 13.
Activists and journalists who tried to tell the truth about the massacre have, the report says, "been arrested on spurious charges, detained, beaten, threatened, put under surveillance or under de facto house arrest, and have been set upon by mobs and humiliated through Soviet-style public denunciations". The prosecutor general has accused western journalists of waging an information war, dubbing them "hyenas and jackals".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1573906,00.html