Explosions Reported As Uzbekistan Violence Continues

Further violence today rocked Uzbekistan as police closed in on terror suspects following a wave of attacks, including the country's first reported suicide bombing, yesterday.

The government said that special forces laid siege to a group of militants north-east of the capital Tashkent - not far from the official residence of the president, Islam Karimov - after reports of explosions and a gun battle between police and suspected terrorists this morning. Soldiers and police used empty trucks and an armoured personnel carrier to block the road to Mr Karimov's residence as they launched an operation to "expose and exterminate" the militants, Ilkhom Zakirov, a foreign ministry spokesman, said.

"The process of apprehending the terrorists [is underway] and, naturally, they are putting up some resistance," the general prosecutor's spokeswoman, Svetlana Artykova, told Reuters.

Today's operation was launched after a man in a car blew himself up while being chased by police, according to an unnamed western diplomat cited by the Associated Press. There was also a shootout at an apartment raided by the authorities to capture three suspects.

A spokesman for the US embassy in Tashkent also said that an explosion today took place near a police checkpoint on the road heading towards the president's official residence. An embassy office remained closed and visa operations were suspended, but other business continued as usual.

The incidents are the latest in a 48-hour wave of violence, in which 19 people - including two suicide bombers - have so far been killed, and more than 20 injured.

The violence began on Sunday with an explosion at what the authorities described as a makeshift bomb-making factory. Yesterday, there were two assaults on police and two suicide bombings.

Security was stepped up across Tashkent, with soldiers on patrol. Hotels deployed metal detectors, and did not allow vehicles to approach.

President Karimov has blamed the attacks on Islamist extremists, and said that several arrests had been made. He yesterday said that backing for the attacks could have come from a banned radical group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, that has never before been linked to terrorist acts.

The group, however, has denied responsibility, and repeated its assertion that it is not involved in terrorist activity.

Dr Imran Waheed, a representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, said: "The finger of blame for these explosions must point at the tyrannical Uzbek regime, which has orchestrated such events in the past in order to suppress legitimate Islamic political opposition.

"They are an act of desperation on the part of a failing and weak regime. The American-backed Uzbek regime wishes to legitimise its suppression of independent Muslims under the guise of the 'war on terror'." He added: "Hizb ut-Tahrir is an Islamic political party that does not undertake violent actions."

The government of the ex-Soviet state provided an airbase for US operations in Afghanistan in 2002. Its harsh crackdown on Muslims and opposition politicians, which it says is part of the "war on terror", has led to strong criticism from the UN over "systematic" use of torture.

Last month, a Tashkent court freed a 62-year-old woman who had been jailed after complaining that her son, arrested as a member of a banned Islamist group, had been tortured and killed.

In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that he US stood firmly behind its ally. "These attacks only strengthen our resolve to defeat terrorists wherever they hide and strike, working in close cooperation with Uzbekistan and our other partners in the global war on terror," he said.