Russia steps up Kyrgyzstan airbase protection


Jun 13, 2010 20:26 Moscow Time


Kyrgyzstan. Photo: EPA

Russia has sent a battalion of elite paratroops on a mission to step up the protection of its Kant airbase in Kyrgyzstan.

The development follows three days of ethnic rioting in that Central Asian country.

Around a hundred people are reported dead and ten times as many injured after rival gangs from the ethnic Kyrgyz and the ethnic Uzbek communities ransacked and torched residential neighbourhoods, shops and bazaars in the southern regions of Osh and Jalalabad.

The rioting and the looting are still going on.