Several of those killed in the overthrow of the Kyrgyzstan government were buried today as security concerns prompted the US military to halt troop flights from its base in the Central Asian state.
Up to 10,000 mourners gathered on the edge of the burned-out Kyrgyz capital at a mass funeral to commemorate at least 78 people who died in protests this week during which troops fired on crowds besieging the presidential headquarters. "Those who died on April 7 are the heroes of Kyrgyzstan," Roza Otunbayeva, the interim government chief, told the crowd.
"It was our duty to establish justice. Those who are being buried here today are all our
children, the children of Kyrgyzstan."
Mourners carried coffins draped in the red-and-yellow Kyrgyz national flag and clutched portraits of the dead at a memorial complex built in honour of the victims of mass executions ordered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin in the 1930s.
Relatives lowered bodies into 16 graves lined in rows and joined hands in prayer, while mullahs chanted in Arabic.
The uprising in Kyrgyzstan, where a third of the 5.3 million population lives below the poverty line, forced the president to retreat to his stronghold in the south of the country and has raised doubts over the future of the US air base near Bishkek.
Members of Kyrgyzstan's self-proclaimed new leadership have said the U.S. lease on the base could be shortened.
Russia, which sees former Soviet Kyrgyzstan as part of its traditional sphere of interest, also has an air base in the country. A Russian official, who declined to be named, said on Thursday that the country should have only a Russian base.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became the first world leader to recognise the authority of the self-proclaimed government, just hours after it took power, raising suspicions that Moscow had played a role in the events.