15 Pakistani students held hostage in Kyrgyzstan, one killed

[sparklingway]

One Pakistani killed in Kyrgyzstan violence​

Sunday, 13 Jun, 2010

ISLAMABAD: One Pakistani student has been killed and around 15 reportedly taken hostage in Kyrgyzstan's riot-stricken city of Osh, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Sunday.

“Our first priority is to ensure safety of our brethren stranded there. We are trying to establish contact with Kyrgyz authorities,” Qureshi told Reuters.

Kyrgyzstan's interim government on Sunday declared a state of emergency across the country's entire southern Jalalabad region, as deadly ethnic clashes spread there from neighbouring Osh.

Qureshi said that including 100 students, there are about 1,500 Pakistanis present in Kyrgyzstan currently.

Speaking to the media in Islamabad, Qureshi said that due to summer holidays, most of the Pakistani students were not in the country, however, because of late examinations, 100 to 120 students were staying back.

Qureshi said that all measures were being taken to protect the Pakistani community present in Kyrgyzstan and that the Foreign Office was constantly in contact with the Pakistani ambassador in Kyrgyzstan.

The deceased student belonged to Jhang, DawnNews reported.

Kyrgyzstan will send reserve forces and volunteers to its troubled south on Sunday after a third night of gun battles took the death toll to 80 in the Central Asian state's worst ethnic violence in two decades.

The interim government of Kyrgyzstan, an ex-Soviet republic hosting US and Russian military bases, granted shoot-to-kill powers to its security forces after deadly riots between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the southern cities of Osh and Jalalabad.

The Interior Ministry said in a statement it would send a volunteer force to the south because the situation in Osh and Jalalabad regions - strongholds of ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev - remained “complex and tense”.

A Reuters correspondent said gunfire could be heard from an Uzbek neighbourhood of Osh, Kyrgyzstan's second-largest city, where homes and businesses have been burned to the ground, but the shootouts had become less frequent than 24 hours ago.

Renewed turmoil in Kyrgyzstan has fuelled concern in Russia, the United States and neighbour China. Washington uses an air base at Manas in the north of the country, about 300 km (190 miles) from Osh, to supply its forces in Afghanistan.

The violence is the worst since Bakiyev was toppled in riots in April. Interim government leader Roza Otunbayeva has accused supports of Bakiyev, who is in exile in Belarus, of stoking ethnic conflict in the former president's southern base.

Supporters of Bakiyev briefly seized government buildings in the south on May 13, defying central authorities. The Otunbayeva government has only limited control over the south, which is separated from the northern capital Bishkek by mountains.

The latest clashes are the worst ethnic violence since 1990, when then-Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev sent in Soviet troops after hundreds of people were killed in and around Osh.

Kyrgyzstan appealed on Saturday for Russian help in quelling the riots, which the Health Ministry says have killed 80 people - 72 in Osh and eight in Jalalabad - and wounded 1,066.

Russia said it would not send in peacekeepers alone but would discuss the situation on Monday within a Moscow-led security bloc of former Soviet republics known as the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was following the situation closely and had discussed it with the leaders of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the two powers bordering Kyrgyzstan, the Kremlin said.

The United States said it supported “efforts coordinated by the United Nations and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to facilitate peace and order”, and said it urged its citizens in the country to maintain contact with the US embassy.

REFUGEES

Kyrgyzstan, which won independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, has been in turmoil since the revolt that toppled Bakiyev on April 7, kindling fears of civil war.

Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan intertwine in the Fergana Valley.

While Uzbeks make up 14.5 per cent of the Kyrgyz population, the two groups are roughly equal in the Osh and Jalalabad regions.

Gas has been shut off to Osh and some neighbourhoods are without electricity. Otunbayeva also warned of a humanitarian crisis as food supplies in besieged regions are running out.

Residents of Osh have fled to the nearby border with Uzbekistan. Local media reports said at least 1,000 people, mainly women and children, had made it across the border.

The Uzbek Foreign Ministry has expressed “great concern” about the events in Osh, saying there were “reasons to conclude that such events are organised, managed and provocational”.

Russia offered humanitarian aid and sent in a helicopter with doctors to fly out some of the wounded, the Kremlin said.

The European Union said it was sending its special representative for Central Asia, Pierre Morel.

 

[sparklingway]

15 Pakistani students held hostage in Kyrgyzstan, one killed​

English.news.cn 2010-06-13 17:03:29

ISLAMABAD, June 13 (Xinhua)-- At least 15 Pakistani students were held hostage by extremists in Kyrgyzstan as one of them was reportedly killed, local media quoted the Foreign Office of Pakistan as saying on Sunday.

The Foreign Office of Pakistan said it is now in contact with the Pakistani ambassador in Kyrgyzstan and will help recover the students held hostage in Kyrgyzstan.

 

[Ahmad]

the situation is quite bad there.

 

[Iggy]

Heard that they asked Russians to help and Russia will send paratroopers..one local newspaper here reported it ..

 

[Iggy]

Heard that they asked Russians to help and Russia will send paratroopers..one local newspaper here reported it ..

Yes they asked for Russian help..hope they can find those Pakistani students

BBC News - Kyrgyz leader asks Russia to restore order in Osh

Kyrgyz leader asks Russia to restore order in Osh


Kyrgyzstan's interim government has asked Russia to help end ethnic clashes in the southern city of Osh, in which 77 people have been killed.

"We need the entry of outside armed forces to calm the situation down," interim leader Roza Otunbayeva said.

But Russia said for the time being it would not send troops to Kyrgyzstan.

Thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have massed at the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border as they try to escape fighting between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks that has raged for two days.

One child was crushed to death at the border.

In a televised address, Ms Otunbayeva said she had sent a letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev asking him to send military reinforcements.

She described the situation in Osh as "out of control".

Russia was not prepared to send troops to Kyrgyzstan under the current circumstances, but would send humanitarian aid to the violence-hit region, a spokeswoman for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said.

"It is an internal conflict and for now Russia does not see the conditions for taking part in its resolution," Natalya Timakova, Mr Medvedev's spokeswoman, was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

Mr Medvedev would consult with other members of the regional security grouping, the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, about a response to the crisis, Ms Timakova said.

The 150 Russian soldiers based near the Kyrgyz capital had been given no instruction to intervene, Russian media quoted an unnamed senior military source as saying.

A plane carrying medical supplies has been sent to Kyrgyzstan to evacuate some of the badly-injured people for treatment in Russia, officials in Moscow said.

The violence is the worst to hit the Central Asian country since President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was overthrown in April.

Nearly people have been hurt, health ministry officials said, adding that there was a shortage of food and care for the injure

 

[Frankenstein]

RIP to the deceased

 

[GUNNER]

MOSCOW, June 13, 2010 (AFP) - Three Russian military planes carrying a squadron of paratroopers landed Sunday at its airbase in Kyrgzystan, a source in the Russian military told the Interfax news agency.
"The task of the landing force is to strengthen the protection of Russian military installations and ensure the security of Russian troops and their family members," the source said.
Russia's Kant military base is located around 20 kilometres (14 miles) from the capital of the Central Asian state, where deadly ethnic violence raged for a third day Sunday in the country's south.

 

[GUNNER]

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, June 13, 2010 (AFP) - Criminal gangs exploited Kyrgyzstan's entrenched ethnic divisions and a power vacuum to spark the volatile Central Asian nation's latest surge of deadly violence, analysts say.

Historic ethnic hostilities between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks exploded last week into deadly violence that has left at least 97 dead and more than 1,200 wounded in the southern Fergana Valley.

The interim government has struggled to assert its control there since an April uprising that toppled president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, and criminal bosses in the region have stepped into the power vacuum, analysts said.

"Political regime change always brings with it changes in the criminal world in this country," said Sanobar Shermatova, an expert with news portal Ferghana.ru, which specialises on the region.

Regional mafia heads had a stake in Bakiyev's regime and relatives of the ousted president -- Bakiyev's political stronghold was in southern Kyrgyzstan -- in turn held sway over the south of the country, with the help of those crime bosses.

The gangs of marauding youths who started the latest violence overnight Thursday were organised by local crime syndicates, Shermatova and other analysts said.

"From the outside it looks like an inter-ethnic conflict but those who are provoking it are aiming at giving exactly that impression," Moscow-based journalist and Central Asia expert Arkady Dubnov said.

In fact, Dubnov explained, "this conflict was sparked by gangs of youths that were specially organised, hired and paid so that they would chaotically attack... to provoke animosities between the groups."

The hired gangs were brought in from outside villages and "had no relationship to the local people" in the villages where they committed violence, he said.

"It worked," he said. "The psychology there was completely manipulated and very quickly took hold."

The conflict was sparked on an "artificial pretext" of a rumour that a Kyrgyz girl had been raped by Uzbeks, said Sergei Masaulov, head of the Institute of Strategic Analysis in Kyrgyzstan.

"What's going on in the South is not an ethnic conflict but a classic act of provocation by outside players and the use of destructive forces and criminal acts to destabilise the country," Masaulov said.

Bakiyev, in exile in Belarus, vehemently denied any link to the violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, calling claims of his involvement a "shameless lie."

But while analysts say the latest violence originated with criminal gangs taking advantage of lawlessness in the south, they say long-standing ethnic divisions in the region have hugely exacerbated what might have been a containable problem.

Ethnic unrest has long simmered along the southern border of the ex-Soviet state, where it uneasily shares the fertile Ferghana valley with Uzbekistan.

Hundreds were killed in sporadic ethnic clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the two groups have eyed each other warily since.

Neighborhoods in and around the flashpoint city of Osh are frequently divided along ethnic lines.

Since Kyrgyzstan's independence in 1991, the country has seen a growing nationalist movement and disputes over the status of the ethnic Uzbeks.

The violence could see Kyrgyzstan, until recently hailed as one of the more democratic countries in Central Asia, lurch dramatically toward a more authoritarian government, analysts said.

"What is happening in Osh could bring a change of regime in the republic. In particular, society could ask for a 'firm hand', a strong leader," said political analyst Mars Sariyev.

 

[Nahraf]

Central Asia had been dumping ground of Soviet Union where many ethnic groups were deported and settled. The border were intentionally drawn to create tension among nationalities. Farghana valley has been divided between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan while some villages in one country are extra territorial land belonging to another country. All Central Asia are Muslim; all Turkic except Tajikistan which is Persian. They are all "istan" like Afghanistan and Pakistan. There were one million Volga Germans deported to Kazakhstan by Stalin and they are now repatriated to Germany. There are 150,000 Korean deported by Stalin from Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island to Central Asia. Now Central Asian countries rediscovering their roots and becoming nationalists and want these settlers to return back to their countries.

 

[GUNNER]

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi says the Foreign Office is in touch with the Kyrgyz interim government for the repatriation of stranded Pakistani students.

Talking to a private news channel, foreign minister said the government will take every step to ensure the safety and security of the students.

Qureshi said Islamabad is mulling sending a plane to Osh, where as many as 269 students are awaiting help.

The foreign minister said around forty students have already been shifted to safe places to ensure their well-being till their repatriation.

He said the killed Pakistani student Ali Raza, who belonged to Jhang, was hit by a stray bullet.

The foreign minister also revealed that the Kyrgyz government has sought humanitarian assistance from Pakistan.

 

[Ahchai Eliminator]

15 Pakistani students held hostage in Kyrgyzstan, one killed June 13, 2010

A total of 15 Pakistani students were held hostage by extremists in Kyrgyzstan and one of them was shot dead, local media quoted the Foreign Office of Pakistan as saying on Sunday.

A spokesman with the Foreign Office of Pakistan said the government is now in contact with the Pakistani ambassador in Kyrgyzstan and will help recover the students held hostage in Kyrgyzstan.

Local sources told Xinhua the unidentified extremists sent a message to the Pakistani Embassy in Kyrgyzstan following their abduction of the 15 Pakistani students, threatening to kill them. One of the students killed is said from Punjab province in Pakistan.

However, motives behind the abduction and other relevant details regarding the incident are not immediately known.

Currently there are more than 100 Pakistanis in Kyrgyzstan, a central Asian country which is currently experiencing a serious internal turmoil.

Source: Xinhua
15 Pakistani students held hostage in Kyrgyzstan, one killed - People's Daily Online

 

[EjazR]

Russia sends troops as Kyrgyz towns burn - Arab News

ISLAMABAD/OSH: A Pakistani student has been killed and around 15 reportedly taken hostage in Kyrgyzstan's riot-stricken southern city of Osh, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said Sunday. At least 97 people have been killed — 72 in Osh alone — in gunbattles over the past three days in the Central Asian state's worst ethnic violence in two decades.

"Our first priority is to ensure the safety of our brethren stranded there. We are trying to establish contact with Kyrgyz authorities," Qureshi said. Around 1,200 Pakistanis, mostly students, live in Kyrgyzstan, although many of them have returned to Pakistan for summer vacations, the minister said. Universities in the former Soviet states are attractive to many Pakistanis for their cheaper training in medical and engineering fields.

Obaid Ansari, who studies medicine in Osh, said he fled the city and returned to Pakistan shortly after riots broke out. "I am receiving text messages from my colleagues and friends that have taken refuge in basements. They informed me that 15 have been abducted," Ansari said by telephone from his home town of Jacobabad in southern Pakistan.

"I and four of my friends managed to flee as we were outside Osh when trouble started. When we returned, there was fire all over," he said, adding the situation in Osh was "very dangerous".

Russia sent hundreds of paratroopers to Kyrgyzstan on Sunday to protect its military facilities, Interfax reported, as ethnic clashes spread to Jalalabad and the countryside.

Ethnic Uzbeks in a besieged neighborhood of Osh said gangs, aided by the military, were carrying out genocide, burning residents out of their homes and shooting them as they fled. Witnesses saw bodies lying on the streets.

Interfax news agency, citing a security source, said a battalion of Russian paratroopers had arrived in the country on Sunday to help protect Russian military facilities. A Russian army battalion is usually around 400 men, but Interfax referred to a "reinforced battalion", which can include as many as 650 troops.

"The mission of the force that has landed is to reinforce the defense of Russian military facilities and ensure security of Russian military servicemen and their families," the source was quoted as saying.

"God help us! They are killing Uzbeks like animals. Almost the whole city is in flames," Dilmurad Ishanov, an ethnic Uzbek human rights worker, told Reuters by telephone from Osh.

"Residents are calling us and saying soldiers are firing at them. There's an order to shoot the marauders, but they aren't shooting them," said ex-parliamentary deputy Alisher Sabirov, a peacekeeping volunteer in Osh.

 

[Rebell]

Nuke Kyrgyzstan, useless country, no purpose, Destroy !

 

[rohailmalhi]

Nuke Kyrgyzstan, useless country, no purpose, Destroy !

U must be joking...........

 

[GUNNER]

2 PAF C-130s are being dispatched to Kyrgyzstan with humanitarian aid. They will also bring back the 269 Pakistani students stranded in Osh. Kyrgyz government had shifted all the Pakistani students to it's military barracks on Sunday.