Kyrgyz capital calms down, unrest victims buried
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Three days after the unrest broke out, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan resumed peace Saturday, with a grand and solemn funeral held for some of those victims outside Bishkek.
However, the nation's future remained unclear.
Weathering through days of unrest, the security situation of Bishkek has significantly improved on Saturday, where policemen can be seen regulating normal traffic along the street. Some of the stores have reopened as well.
Some traffic police officers working on the streets told Xinhua that they had started to work since Friday.
Crowds of people still gathered around the presidential building, mourning for those victims, but their looks were quite calm rather than agitated.
Officials from the Chinese embassy to Kyrgyzstan told Xinhua that the riots in the streets were appeased rather fast, compared with the similar unrests five years ago.
The interim government of Kyrgyzstan held a solemn funeral service on Saturday morning for some of the victims killed in recent political unrest in the country. No clashes occurred at the funeral, which was attended by thousands of people, during which the bodies of the victims were covered with the national flag of Kyrgyzstan and were buried in accordance with traditional Muslim rituals.
Families of the victims held photos of their beloved. Military policemen at the funeral fired shots in commemoration of the dead.
Interim leader Roza Otunbayeva paid condolences to the victims' families at the funeral, pledging to provide livelihood support. She also said the interim government would endeavor to construct a transparent, honest and clean nation.
The health minister in Kyrgyzstan's interim government said Saturday that the overnight deaths of three injured people have brought the total death toll from the unrest in the impoverished Central Asian country up to 79. More than 1,400 others were also injured.
Earlier this week, thousands of protesters clashed with security forces throughout the country, driving out local governments and seizing government headquarters in Bishkek.
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev fled the capital to southern Kyrgyzstan and opposition parties formed an interim government led by Otunbayeva, the former foreign minister, on Thursday.
The opposition-controlled interim government planned on Saturday to deprive the immunity of Bakiyev, who has so far refused to step down.
Meanwhile there were reports the same day saying that the interim government was negotiating with Bakiyev's close relatives in the southern region of Jalalabad on the president's resignation, where Bakiyev's hometown was located.
An envoy to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) also said on Saturday that Bakiyev has held talks with the interim government, in an effort to solve the current political crisis.
Opinions still varied concerning the real reasons behind the Kyrgyz unrest, the whereabouts of Bakiyev, as well as the person actually taking control of the military forces, all of which have further perplexed the already complicated political prospects of Kyrgyzstan.
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