Uzbekistan jails 24 after latest bombing trials

Reuters October 13 Uzbekistan has jailed 24 people for up to 18 years for involvement in bombings and shoot-outs earlier this year, court officials said on Wednesday. Human rights groups have expressed concern over the series of trials linked to violence in March and April in which 47 people were killed -- most of them alleged militants or police -- and have accused the police of extracting confessions through torture. Court officials said two trials in the ancient Silk Road city of Bukhara -- one of 16 men and one of eight women -- ended on Tuesday with the conviction of all defendants for crimes including bomb-making, terrorism and trying to overthrow the constitution. Those verdicts bring to at least 52 the number of people convicted and jailed following the violence. The bombings and clashes with police earlier this year ended five years of apparent stability in the poor, mostly Muslim Central Asian state bordering Afghanistan. Several people died in suicide bombings at foreign embassies and the prosecutor's office in the summer. Uzbek officials have said they are fighting Islamic militants linked to al Qaeda, but foreign observers have cast doubt on this, pointing to growing poverty and reports of the widespread imprisonment of dissident Muslims. Britain's ambassador to Uzbekistan has accused his own country's spies of "lapping up" information gathered through torture in Uzbekistan and falling for bogus information. "Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the U.S. and the UK to believe: that they and we are fighting the same war against terror," ambassador Craig Murray wrote in a secret memo obtained by Reuters on Monday. Uzbek officials have declined immediate comment on the memo. Uzbekistan has acknowledged incidents of torture in its prisons but says the practice is no longer systematic and it is trying to stop it. The country has given Washington the use of an airbase in the south for operations in Afghanistan.