Uzbek President Islam Karimov said 10 government troops and "many more" protesters were killed but refused to be more specific. He spoke at a news conference in the capital Tashkent a day after the unprecedented clashes in his tightly controlled country, which he has led since before the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The violence erupted after days of peaceful protest in the eastern city of Andijan, against the imprisonment of 23 local business leaders accused of Islamic extremism.

A mob reportedly seized arms from a local garrison, before raiding the prison where the men were held and freeing them, along with thousands of other inmates.

They also took control of administrative buildings in the city and took government workers hostage, according to reports.

Just before dusk, troops moved in and opened fire on the crowds in the city square.

Men, women and children fled in panic. One woman spoke of "indiscriminate firing", and said she saw "bloody corpses" lying in a ditch.

In the eastern city of Andijan, hundreds of protesters gathered at the square, displaying the bodies of six people killed in Friday's bloodshed and tearfully denouncing the government.

"Our women and children are dying," said Daniyar Akbarov, 24, who claimed to have seen at least 300 people killed in the violence.

Big military trucks loaded with soldiers cruised the streets and troops backed by armored vehicles surrounded the heavily fortified police headquarters.

Earlier, soldiers loaded scores of bodies of those killed onto four trucks and a bus after blocking friends and relatives from collecting them, witnesses said.

Lutfulo Shamsutdinov, the head of the Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan, said he saw about 200 victims being loaded onto trucks near the square in Andijan, the fourth-largest city with a population of 350,000.

Another witness who declined to be named said "many, many dead bodies" were stacked up by a school near the square. The city's hospital was cordoned off and officials could not be reached for casualty figures.

An AP reporter said she saw at least 30 bodies. All had been shot, and at least one had his skull smashed. She said there were large pools of blood and hundreds of spent cartridges on the streets.

A group of foreign journalists was detained early yesterday and told to leave the city immediately.

Some 4,000 Uzbeks fled to the border with neighboring Kyrgyzstan, seeking asylum. Kyrgyz border guards were awaiting a government decision on whether to allow them in, said Gulmira Borubayeva, a spokeswoman for Kyrgyzstan's border guard service.

A move to shelter the refugees could badly strain Kyrgyzstan's relations with Karimov's government.