Leader: Spurn extremists

The secretive group wants a worldwide Islamic government.
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (AP) -- Pleading in a nationwide TV address Saturday for Uzbeks to spurn extremist Islamic influences, President Islam Karimov blamed the same group behind unprecedented similar attacks earlier this year for suicide bombings against the U.S. and Israeli embassies.
He spoke after a police officer guarding the U.S. Embassy died overnight from injuries in Friday's attacks, which also hit the chief prosecutor's office in the Uzbek capital, said general prosecutor's spokeswoman Svetlana Artikova. That raised the death toll to at least six, including the three bombers.
Didn't name group
While not naming the group behind the attacks, Karimov pointedly mentioned Hizb ut-Tahrir, a secretive extremist Islamic group that has spread across Central Asia since the Soviet collapse. The group, whose Arabic name means Party of Liberation, claims to disavow violence in its quest to create worldwide Islamic government.
In a bid to crush extremism, Karimov's authoritarian regime has arrested thousands of members of Hizb ut-Tahrir and other Muslims who worship outside state-run mosques, but critics say the campaign has backfired and it has drawn strong international criticism.
Doubts group's motives
"Some international human rights organizations who take Hizb ut-Tahrir under their wing and protect them say they are innocent lambs," Karimov said in the speech late Saturday. "But if this group wanted to create a caliphate [Islamic state] and overthrow the government, how can they do it peacefully, without bloodshed?"
The near-simultaneous triple suicide attacks were the second attacks to hit Uzbekistan this year, raising fears of instability in Central Asia's most populous nation, and took place during the first trial of 15 suspects in the wave of March-April violence that left at least 47 dead.
Karimov said both attacks were organized "from the same group, and serve the same aims," which he said were to sow fear and disrupt the country's "peaceful and stable life."
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