In Midst of Deadly Uzbek Protest, a Baffled Businessman

SUZAK, Kyrgyzstan, May 18 -- As the door to his prison cell was battered open on Friday night, Odil Maksataliev said he jumped back in surprise. Eight armed men burst in.

Maksataliev had never seen them before, but they seemed to recognize him immediately. "We know that you are one of the businessmen who was put here for no reason, and we've come to set you free," he recalled one of them announcing.

Then they hustled him outside into the early morning darkness, running past the bloodied bodies of two prison guards who lay still on the ground. A fleet of cars was waiting.

So went a jailbreak in the city of Andijon, touching off uprisings in several other cities in Uzbekistan, the Central Asian country that has been ruled by Islam Karimov since it gained independence in 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Twenty-three local businessmen accused of forming a terrorist cell were freed by the gunmen, along with about 2,000 other inmates.

Within hours, the businessmen were featured guests on the speaker's platform at an unprecedented demonstration in the city's central square against Karimov's autocratic rule. But the rally ended in a bloodbath when Uzbek security forces directed a barrage of gunfire at the protesters.

On Wednesday, Maksataliev stood in a tent encampment on a grassy hillside near the city of Suzak in neighboring Kyrgyzstan with several fellow businessmen and about 500 other people who had fled Uzbekistan.

Wearing a dusty tracksuit and clutching a small sheet of paper documenting his application for political asylum in Kyrgyzstan, Maksataliev seemed indistinguishable from the other bedraggled escapees.

But his story addresses the continuing controversy over who is behind the revolt in the mostly Muslim Uzbekistan, which hosts a U.S. air base used in the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

U.S. and British authorities on Wednesday demanded an impartial international investigation into the violence. Karimov, meanwhile, has asserted that the businessmen, the men who freed them and most of the protesters were violent Islamic radicals who want to turn the country into an extremist theocracy.

Restriction of worship is a common complaint in Uzbekistan. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan group created by Congress, this month reported "severe violations of religious freedom" in the country.

Uzbek authorities "crack down harshly on Muslim individuals, groups, and mosques that do not conform to government-prescribed practices or that the government claims are associated with extremist political programs," a report said. "This has resulted in the imprisonment of thousands of persons in recent years."