Kyrgyzstan's interim president said Friday that the death toll from the ethnic clashes that have rocked the country's south could be near 2,000, as she made her first visit to a riot-hit city since the unrest broke out. Kyrgyz Health Ministry officials figures put the number of killed in rampages led mainly by ethnic Kyrgyz against Uzbeks at 191. “I would increase by ten times the official data on the number of people killed,” Interim President Roza Otunbayeva said, according to her spokesman, Farid Niyazov. She said current figures don't take into account those buried before sundown on the day of death, in keeping with Muslim tradition, according to the spokesman. The UN said as many as 1 million people may need aid in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, including the potential number of refugees, internally displaced, host families and others that may suffer in one way or another from the unrest. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said it was working on a worst-case estimate that the crisis in Kyrgyzstan may affect up to one million people, about a third of whom could be refugees. “We are working with a planning figure of one million people that have been directly or indirectly affected by this event – 300,000 of them... refugees,” said Giuseppe Annunziata, WHO coordinator for emergency program support. The UN health agency official confirmed when asked that the figures were a “worst-case scenario”, and that the remaining 700,000 are people who could be displaced within Kyrgyzstan by the conflict.
