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Witnesses said that troops had shot dead about 500 protesters, including women and children, in Andizhan, a city of 300,000 in eastern Uzbekistan. The protest was sparked by the trial of 23 Muslim businessmen seen as part of the repressive policy of President Islam Karimov. Mr George Galloway MP appeared before a US Senate homeland security and government affairs subcommittee, chaired by Mr Norm Coleman, the Republican senator for Minnesota, which a week earlier had said it had ‘detailed evidence’ that under the UN oil-for-food programme during the rule of Saddam Hussein, Iraq had allocated Mr Galloway 20 million barrels of oil. He said the claim was ‘utterly unsubstantiated and false’; ‘I am not now nor have I ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone on my behalf.’ In Iraq dozens were killed during the week, and the number of US military losses rose to at least 1,621 since March 2003, according to the Associated Press news agency. In Afghanistan about 15 people were killed in clashes between security forces and demonstrators, and protests swept the Islamic world after Newsweek in its issue dated 9 May said a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay had found that interrogators had flushed at least one copy of the Koran down the lavatory; but then Newsweek retracted the report, saying its source had ‘backed away’ from the claim. In North Ossetia the trial began of a man said to be the only survivor of the Chechen terrorists who took hostage a school full of children in Beslan last year, leading to the deaths of 330 people. Mr Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company and Russia’s richest man, was found guilty on several charges of tax evasion and fraud after a ten-month trial. French workers stayed at home on Whit Monday which, to save money, the government had cancelled as a holiday.
CSH
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