BISHKEk – Kyrgyz security forces killed two suspected Islamist militants in a raid on Wednesday on rebels accused of killing three policemen on Tuesday.
One officer of the GKNB security service died of wounds sustained during the attack, a police spokesman said. Kyrgyz security officials had pledged tough punishment for “religious extremists” who they say shot the three policemen in a residential area of the capital Bishkek.
“Two terrorists were destroyed during the special operation. One was wounded, captured and is now being interrogated,” police spokesman Rakhmatillo Akhmedov said after the gunfight in the village of Besh-Kungei outside Bishkek.
He said security forces were chasing the rest of the group, but did not say how many of them there were. Police said earlier they suspected six Kyrgyz-born men of killing the policemen. The shootout just 10 km from Bishkek underlined Kyrgyzstan’s instability after a year of upheaval and violence. A mainly Muslim nation where both Russia and the United States hold military air bases, Kyrgyzstan saw its president deposed in a bloody revolt last April. In June, it was rocked by ethnic riots, in which at least 400 people were killed.
The impoverished nation, which lies on a drug trafficking route out of Afghanistan, has elected a new legislature, laying the foundation to become the first parliamentary democracy in authoritarian Central Asia. Officials say Islamist militants, recruiting supporters amid abject poverty, are fast becoming a threat to the fragile peace. The GKNB security service said those accused of killing the policemen were “leaders and active members of an extremist religious group”.
It said they had been behind a Nov. 30 explosion in Bishkek that wounded at least two people outside a sports palace where a group of people are standing trial accused of mass killings during the April revolt.
A day earlier, four Islamist militants were killed during a raid in the southern city of Osh, the focal point for the ethnic bloodshed in June.
Security police also said the same group had planned but failed to blow up a jeep packed with explosives and parked near the Bishkek police building on Dec. 24.
“A war has been declared on all of us,” Kyrgyz Interior Minister Zarylbek Rysaliyev said in an address to citizens.
Kyrgyz troops clash with Islamists in retaliatory raid
