MOSCOW, May 15: Russia said on Sunday that pre-planned actions by regional extremists, including Afghanistan’s Taliban, were behind the violence in ex-Soviet Uzbekistan that killed dozens in the Central Asian nation, ITAR-TASS reported. “We are receiving disquieting information that everything that happened there was pre-planned,” the news agency quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.

“According to our information, the group that had prepared all this and tried to bring it to fruition included various representatives, including the Taliban,” Lavrov said. The hardline Islamist Taliban regime had ruled Uzbekistan’s southern neighbour Afghanistan until late 2001, when it was routed by a US-led invastion following the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Russia, whose battle against Chechen insurgents is now in its 11th year, is a staunch supporter of Uzbekistan’s hardline President Islam Karimov, whose regime has been accused by human rights groups of using systematic torture in its prisons and jails for years.

The bloodshed in the impoverished nation started early Friday, when weeks-long demonstrations over a trial of 23 local businessmen boiled over. Prosecutors had accused the men of belonging to an outlawed Islamic group, but their supporters said the charges were fabricated.

After armed backers of the accused stormed a local prison to free them, along with some 2,000 other prisoners, the military moved into the city that by then was gripped by mass anti-government protests. Witnesses accused the soldiers of firing indiscriminately into the crowd.

Amid a media clampdown by the government, accurate death toll figures were impossible to come by. Local witnesses told AFP of seeing up to 300 dead. Karimov, who said soldiers shot only after being fired upon, said 30 people had died, most of them law enforcement officers.—AFP