Twenty police reported killed in Turkmen clashes
ASHGABAT (AFP) — Turkmen police fought lengthy gun battles with a gang of drug dealers, officials said Sunday, after reports 20 police had been killed in the clashes in the capital of the reclusive Central Asian state.
Police clashed with "a criminal group involved in the illegal drug trade" in Ashgabat, the Turkmen foreign ministry said in a rare confirmation of unrest in the ex-Soviet republic, one of the world's most totalitarian regimes.
"Special units of Turkmenistan's law-enforcement agencies carried out an operation to seize (the group), as a result of which the above-mentioned criminal group was neutralised," the ministry said.
The statement did not give details on the fighting, which the exiled Turkmen opposition described as a bloody clash between government forces and an extremist religious group.
An AFP journalist in Ashgabat heard automatic weapon fire and intermittent blasts over a roughly 12-hour period overnight Friday to Saturday.
The neighbourhood in Ashgabat's northern suburbs where the fighting took place was sealed off until Sunday.
When it was reopened, no sign of the fighting was evident except that police had cordoned off a drinking-water plant that had apparently been at the centre of the clashes, the AFP journalist said.
Police battled "a religious group, possibly radical Islamists," according to a diplomatic source quoted by a website set up by opposition leader Boris Shikhmuradov, founder of Turkmenistan's Popular Democratic Movement.
"Witnesses said that 20 police were killed and their bodies were taken in secret to an Ashgabat hospital," said the www.gundogar.org website which is not accessible in Turkmenistan.
Other residents of the Turkmen capital contacted by AFP confirmed they had heard heavy gunfire.
In Moscow, Arkady Dubnov, a reporter for the Vremya Novostei daily and an expert on Central Asia, told AFP his Ashgabat sources had informed him of "tanks and armoured vehicles opening fire on a drinking water factory" in northern Ashgabat where an armed group was hiding.
According to Dubnov's sources between 10 and 20 bodies of dead policemen were brought to the morgue in Ashgabat.
Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov came to power in 2007 and has since sought to dismantle a personality cult around his autocratic predecessor, while courting Western investment and promising to reform the nation's stifling political system.
Human rights campaigners have called for the release of several political prisoners among the country's inmates.
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International said in a report published in June that widespread rights violations continue in Turkmenistan in spite of the president's promise to protect them.
Under his predecessor -- Sapurmurat Niyazov, better known by the moniker Turkmenbashi -- statues of the president were erected throughout the country and schoolchildren were forced to study the Ruhnama, a religious tract penned by Niyazov.
