Uzbeks Detain 30 For Terrorism

Authorities have detained 30 people on terrorism charges in the wake of three days of attacks that killed 42 people in this former Soviet republic, a news agency reported Wednesday, citing prosecutors.

Police declined to confirm the number of people detained, but said they were still combing the Uzbek capital for more suspects.

They 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.

The violence has been Uzbekistan's first serious unrest since it let hundreds of U.S. troops use a base near the Afghan border after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Prosecutor-General Rashid Kadyrov said the 30 suspects had been detained over the past two days, according to Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency. He said they were accused of involvement in terrorist acts in the capital Tashkent as well as the Bukhara region.

Prosecutor-General spokeswoman Svetlana Artikova couldn't confirm any arrests, saying only that "the investigations are continuing."

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 U.S. Embassy in Tashkent said no new violence was reported Wednesday in the country. However, the Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan — where access already is strictly controlled — had been closed to all except diplomatic traffic, it 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 were members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist Islamic group that Karimov has named in relation to the attacks.

Bichenov instead said the suspects were aligned with the Wahhabi sect of Islam.

On Monday, Kadyrov told journalists that 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 Tuesday that 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 Qaeda 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 said four bodies lay 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.

By Burt Herman