Eighteen people were killed and 243 wounded during unrest in Uzbekistan's autonomous province of Karakalpakstan that broke out last week over plans to curtail its autonomy, Uzbek authorities said on Monday.
Security forces detained 516 people while dispersing the protesters last Friday but have now released many of them, the national guard press office told a briefing.
On Saturday, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev dropped plans to amend articles of the constitution concerning Karakalpakstan's autonomy and its right to secede. He also declared a month-long state of emergency in the northwestern province. [L8N2YK08U]
Official reports said protesters had marched through the provincial capital of Nukus last Friday and tried to seize local government buildings, triggering the worst bout of violence in almost two decades in the Central Asian nation of 34 million.
According to the prosecutor general's office, 18 people died "from grave wounds" sustained during the clashes.
Karakalpakstan, situated on the shores of the Aral Sea that has for decades been a site of environmental disaster, is home to Karakalpaks, an ethnic minority group whose language is closer to Kazakh than Uzbek.
Mirziyoyev spoke on Monday to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the president of Kazakhstan which is home to the largest Karakalpak diaspora abroad. Tokayev's office said he welcomed Tashkent's measures to ensure stability in Karakalpakstan.
Russia, with which ex-Soviet Uzbekistan has close ties, said the matter was Uzbekistan's domestic affair, while the European Union called for "an open and independent investigation into the violent events in Karakalpakstan".
Mirziyoyev's office said separately he discussed the matter with EU Council President Charles Michel and said the unrest had been incited by "criminal elements".
A group of opposition politicians and activists who call themselves the government of Karakalpakstan in exile published an appeal to Mirziyoyev.
In it, they called for the release of arrested demonstrators, the dissolution of the Karakalpak government and holding of new elections, and a review of the actions of law enforcement agencies including "the unjustified and disproportionate use of force that led to human victims, torture and arbitrary detention".
They complained about discrimination against their language and the "silencing and distortion" of the region's history.
(Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London; Editing by Gareth Jones and Alex Richardson)
