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Explosion Hits Uzbek Capital, Militants Take Hostages
By Burt Herman Associated Press Writer
Published: Mar 31, 2004
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (AP) - Militants seized hostages during a standoff with authorities after setting off a grenade when police tried to enter a house in Uzbekistan's capital Wednesday. A television station reported three wounded in the latest wave of terrorist-related violence in this Central Asian nation.
The Tashkent blast came at the end of a day when police scoured the capital in pursuit of fugitive militants, and reportedly arrested at least 30. A police official said those in custody so far were adherents of the strict Wahhabi Islamic sect, which was believed to have inspired Osama bin Laden, not members of an extremist group President Islam Karimov has implied were behind the attacks.
A grenade that was set up as a booby trap detonated when a police patrol tried to enter the gate of a house in Tashkent, leading to a standoff in which militants took hostages, a police major at the scene said.
Russia's Channel One television reported three people were wounded in the blast in the Sabir-Rakhimovski district of Tashkent, about half a mile from the Chorsu bazaar, where suicide attackers struck Monday.
Authorities were negotiating with the hostage-takers in the house, the police major said.
Ilya Pyagay, deputy chief of the Interior Ministry's anti-terrorism department, said police were carrying out an anti-terrorist operation in that neighborhood.
The area is not far from the scene of fighting Tuesday that officials said left 23 people dead, including three police officers.
Police blocked off streets in the Sabir-Rakhimovski district. Four trucks packed with soldiers arrived in the area and pushed back onlookers and establish a cordon around the area. The soldiers, wearing flak jackets and helmets, were armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles.
An Associated Press reporter saw police escorting three women wearing kerchiefs into a police car. Later two buses carrying people who appeared to be civilians left the area under police escort - apparently part of an evacuation - as residents of the neighborhood of small single-family homes stood outside the cordon trying to find out what had happened.
Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency earlier reported a blast also struck a residential building in the Fergana Valley city of Andijan overnight, citing police sources. The explosion could have been an accident, but police did not rule out terrorism. Officials declined to confirm the report.
Since Sunday, at least 42 people have been killed in terrorist-related violence in Uzbekistan - the first unrest here since this Central Asian nation became a key U.S. ally in the war on terror.
Oleg Bichenov, Tashkent city police anti-terrorism deputy chief, declined to confirm how many had been arrested so far.
"The number (of the arrested) will be changing, and I hope it will be going up," he told The Associated Press. "We are continuing to search for suspects and making arrests."
Earlier, a Western security official in Tashkent told AP on condition of anonymity that police and security officers were looking for five suspects.
Nineteen people were killed and 26 wounded on Sunday and Monday in violence that included the first suicide bombings in this Central Asian nation. On Tuesday, 23 people died as Uzbek forces battled for hours with suspected terrorists, and were struck by two suicide attacks.
All the attacks appeared to target Uzbek authorities.
The Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan - where access already is strictly controlled - had been closed to all except diplomatic traffic, the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent said.
An embassy annex office remained closed, although visa operations resumed. Americans were urged to be on "highest alert," as the situation remained unclear.
Bichenov said those in custody were being questioned at length - but that interrogations so far found that none was a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist group. Instead, he said the suspects were aligned with the Wahhabi sect of Islam.
On Monday, Kadyrov said religious literature from Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Wahhabi sect had been found at an alleged terrorist bomb-making factory in the central region of Bukhara.
Hizb ut-Tahrir - which claims to disavow violence while not explicitly ruling it out in its quest to create an Islamic state across the world - has never been linked to any terrorist attacks. Its office in Britain, where the group is allowed to operate openly, denied responsibility for events in Uzbekistan.
Uzbek authorities claim Hizb ut-Tahrir is a breeding ground for terrorists and have sought unsuccessfully to have Washington label it a terrorist group.
The Wahhabi sect is dominant in Saudi Arabia and has attracted many followers across Central Asia and the Caucasus.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States had no information on who was responsible for the attacks but noted the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan has been the dominant threat in the country.
That terror group was believed to have been decimated in the U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, and Pakistani forces this month hunting al-Qaida fugitives on the Afghan border said they wounded the IMU's political leader.
Security remained tighter than usual Wednesday in Tashkent, with soldiers and police searching vehicles at checkpoints. An armored personnel carrier also remained in place on the road leading out of the city toward Karimov's official residence, near the area of suicide bombings and battles between authorities and suspected militants.
Residents near the area of Tuesday's fighting said five men escaped, although it wasn't clear if some of them had been killed at another charred house nearby pockmarked with bullet holes, where residents saw four bodies in the courtyard.
The Interior Ministry said the fighting Tuesday killed three police and wounded five. It said 20 terror suspects died and that all of them blew themselves up, but that contradicted accounts that government forces killed some of the militants in shootouts.
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