New Riots and Lootings Shaking Kyrgyzstan's Interim Government

Kyrgyzstan authorities attempted to impose order Tuesday after five people were killed in ethnic riots, officials said, amid mystery over the whereabouts of the country's ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev.

Ethnic Kyrgyz rioters Monday seized plots of land from Russians and Turks in Mayevka, a village outside the capital Bishkek, prompting the country's interim government to send in hundreds of police to quell the unrest.

"The police and internal forces have established order in the village. Forty instigators of the riots have been arrested. All the provocateurs and ringleaders in the riots will be punished to the full extent of the law," head of the interim government, Roza Otunbayeva, told reporters.

A source in the Kyrgyz interior ministry told Agence France-Presse that around 600 police supported by armored personnel carriers were patrolling Mayevka.

Five people were killed in the rioting, a health ministry spokesman told AFP Tuesday. Earlier the health ministry said three people died from gun wounds, including two residents, and 28 people were injured.

In a chaotic day, the rioters seized land in Mayevka before marching on central Bishkek, witnesses and local media reports said. In Bishkek they forced the city's acting mayor, Isa Omurkulov, to sign a document authorizing the handover of the land they had seized earlier, the official Kabar news agency reported.

The violence was the latest challenge to the interim government which seized power this month after a popular uprising that ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. So far the interim government has failed to establish full control over the country, a mountainous former Soviet republic home to a U.S. Manas air base used to supply operations in nearby Afghanistan.

Bakiyev, the country's toppled president, was confirmed Monday to have left Kazakhstan, where he was flown last week in an action coordinated by world powers aimed at quelling tensions in Kyrgyzstan.