JALAL-ABAD, (Kyrgyzstan), March 20: Protesters in Kyrgyzstan set fire to a police station and stormed a regional governor’s headquarters on Sunday. The incident in the regional centre of Jalal-Abad, long considered a potential trouble-spot, came as around 10,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the regional governor’s office demanding the release of protestors arrested earlier in the day for occupying it. Around 2,000 of the protesters armed with sticks, stones and improvised petrol bombs and using a bus as a battering ram broke into the police compound next to the office and freed around 30 of the arrested protestors.
Some 700 protesters then re-took the governor’s office, hanging banners from the windows demanding President Askar Akayev’s resignation.
Outside protestors set two cars and a bus on fire. Police opened fire to warn off the crowd, injuring one protestor in the leg. A senior interior ministry official however said there had been no gunfire and that the only injured people were two special forces officers.
“Among the protestors there were no victims or injuries as we intentionally didn’t use weapons,” Deputy Interior Minister Abdulda Suranchiyev told state radio.
Sunday’s events in Jalal Abad come amid a wave of unrest in the former Soviet republic over parliamentary polls that went to a second round on March 13 and that the opposition has said were falsified by MR Akayev’s administration.
Earlier on Sunday security forces also ejected protesters from another southern regional administration building in the city of Osh and arrested some 60 people, Mr Suranchiyev said.
Protesters continued to occupy the offices of the governor of the remote western Talas region as well as a number of district mayors’ offices, sources in Talas and local media said.
While protests have barely touched the capital Bishkek, tensions have long run higher in the south of the country, which borders Uzbekistan and saw major inter-ethnic clashes in the Soviet Union’s last months.—AFP
