MOST people in the Uzbek town of Andijan were sleeping when Zikrillo Ayupov heard that his daughter-in-law had given birth to her first baby. Overjoyed, he went to wake Akhmad Khakkarov, a neighbour and old schoolfriend.

The two men prepared a large celebratory pot of mastavu, a traditional bean and milk soup, and set off in a car at 2am for the maternity ward. They never arrived.

At daybreak their bodies were found slumped in the front of their car, which had been pierced by more than 100 bullets. They remained in the middle of the street under a baking sun for more than two days while police prevented relatives from retrieving them for burial.

“They had been hit by so many bullets I couldn’t recognise them at first,” said one of Khakkarov’s relatives. “Soldiers just opened fire on the vehicle, cutting them down without warning — two gentle men on their way to celebrate the birth of a baby.”

Ayupov and Khakkarov, both 44, were among the first victims of a bloodbath in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. As many as 700 people — most of them unarmed civilians — are thought to have died in the worst incident of its kind since China sent its tanks into Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.

The Sunday Times has compiled the most detailed account to date by speaking to dozens of eyewitnesses. Most were interviewed in Andijan, which was effectively closed to other foreign journalists last week, apart from a small group escorted into the city by officials but prevented from talking to inhabitants. Several witnesses were in evident fear of their lives. One interview was cut short by a telephone call, apparently from the security services.

Islam Karimov, the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan, has resisted growing international demands for an independent investigation by insisting that no civilians were killed during what he described as a military operation to put down an uprising on May 13. He put the death toll at 169.

What emerged from the witnesses, however, was that there were not one but three separate massacres of anti-government protesters in Andijan. Some of the wounded were finished off at point blank range and several children caught up in the slaughter also died. Some victims were killed in further sporadic attacks in Andijan; others when troops opened fire on refugees at the Kyrgyz border.

A week later Andijan, a city of 350,000 people, was eerily quiet, its streets almost deserted apart from army patrols in armoured personnel carriers (APCs).

Amid the narrow winding alleys and clay walls of the old town, men dressed in oriental robes and hats gathered to exchange condolences. The women wailed in private. Many were still searching for missing relatives, hoping that they had merely been detained by the SNB secret police, heirs to the Soviet-era KGB.

The chain of events began shortly after 10pm on May 12 when several dozen armed men, believed to have been Islamic extremists, stormed the prison cells of 23 businessmen on trial for allegedly forming a terrorist group.

The gunmen took several prison guards hostage and set off in a convoy along Navoi Avenue, a broad street that leads to the centre of town.

Some had tried to force their way into the SNB’s headquarters by ramming a stolen fire engine into the compound’s high metal gates. But the security forces shot back, the vehicle got stuck and they ran off.

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