Weekly news wrap

This week in Central Asia was marked by a spate of unprecedented violence in Uzbekistan. On Sunday, a blast killed 10 people in the central Uzbek province of Bukhara. On Monday, an explosion ripped through the Chorsu market in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. Some 20 people, including six police officers, were killed and 26 injured over the two day period. The authorities blamed the attacks on religious extremists, particularly Hizb-ut Tahrir, which is banned in Uzbekistan. However, the banned party, legally operating in London, denied the allegations, saying that it didn't practice violence. On Tuesday, Uzbek police and special forces carried out operations in the northern outskirts of the capital to capture those suspected of carrying out the attacks. After a shootout at the hideout of suspected militants in the suburbs of Tashkent, 20 alleged terrorists and 3 police were dead. The same day, Washington issued a warning to US citizens not to travel to or around Uzbekistan, adding that supporters of extremist groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Al-Qaeda, and the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement continued to remain active in the region. On Wednesday, AP reported that Uzbek police searched the capital in pursuit of fugitive militants, and reportedly arrested at least 30. According to the law-enforcement bodies, those in custody so far were adherents of a strict Wahhabi Islamic sect allegedly linked to Al-Qaeda's terrorist network. On Thursday, there was another suicide bombing in Tashkent, while a top anti-terror official linked this week's violence to Al-Qaeda. The incident was followed by another bombing in Bukhara province later that day. It was reported that a woman detonated a bomb, killing one person and critically injuring herself. This brought death toll to 44 by the end of the week. Uzbekistan's neighbours, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan reacted by beefing up security measures on their borders with their Central Asian neighbour. Earlier, Tashkent sealed its borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to prevent suspected terrorists from fleeing the country. In neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, President Askar Akayev urged lawmakers on Wednesday to speed up the adoption of bills aimed at fighting terrorist financing and money laundering, following alleged terrorist attacks in neighbouring Uzbekistan. "These bills are directly aimed at strengthening the fight against criminal money, international terrorism and the use of shadow financial assets that hinder the growth of our economy," he said. In 2002-2003, Kyrgyzstan saw two explosions that killed eight people and were blamed on the IMU. Three people were sentenced to death in connection with those attacks. In Tajikistan, President Ekhmomali Rakhmonov said on Saturday that the mountainous country had seized more than 32 mt of drugs, over half of it heroin, smuggled from its southern neighbour Afghanistan, the world's top heroin producer, between 2000 and 2003. "Drugs are a serious challenge to our national security and that is why the battle against drug smuggling is a priority for us," he said at a meeting with the visiting regional representative from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) James Callahan. Last year, Tajik authorities seized 5.6 mt of Afghan heroin. The impoverished former Soviet republic of Tajikistan shares a 1,340 km border with Afghanistan. On Wednesday, Afghanistan and its six neighbours, including Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, drew up an agreement to combat drug trafficking, the Afghan foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah said at an international donors conference in Berlin. Afghan president Hamid Karzai, speaking at the same conference, said that the booming opium trade in his country was threatening the very existence of the Afghan state. A land mine exploded on the Tajik-Uzbek border in northern Tajikistan, killing three Tajik youths and injuring one, AP reported on Tuesday quoting Gulahmad Sattorov, a spokesman for the Tajik State Border Protection Committee. Four boys aged between 12 and 15 were pasturing their cattle on 25 March, when the mine exploded. The bodies of two of the teenagers were still in the field as authorities had not determined how to safely remove them, Sattorov said. Another boy died on his way to a hospital. A 13-year-old survived but remained unconscious. One week earlier, a 10-year-old shepherd was killed on a minefield not far from the site of Saturday's incident. Some 65 civilians including women and children have been killed and 50 seriously injured since Uzbek border guards mined the border in 2001 in an attempt to stave off incursions by the IMU. Russian border guards shot and killed a Tajik woman when the car she was travelling in failed to stop during an anti-drug operation in southern Tajikistan, Alexander Kondratyev, a spokesman for the Russian border guards stationed in Tajikistan, said on Tuesday. The driver of the car reportedly ignored warning shots from the guards in the Khatlon region near the Afghan border, prompting the guards to open fire, fatally wounding a female passenger, he explained. Some 10,000 Russian border guards help patrol the country's long and rugged border with Afghanistan. AFP reported on Friday that Tajik border guards would take control of the Tajik-Afghan border, currently under the responsibility of Russian guards, before the end of the year. A new accord between Tajikistan and Russia should soon be signed to replace the 1993 agreement, under which Russian guards patrol the border alongside Tajik troops.