"Our first priority is to ensure the safety of our brethren stranded there. We are trying to establish contact with Kyrgyz authorities," Qureshi said. Around 1,200 Pakistanis, mostly students, live in Kyrgyzstan, although many of them have returned to Pakistan for summer vacations, the minister said. Universities in the former Soviet states are attractive to many Pakistanis for their cheaper training in medical and engineering fields.
Obaid Ansari, who studies medicine in Osh, said he fled the city and returned to Pakistan shortly after riots broke out. "I am receiving text messages from my colleagues and friends that have taken refuge in basements. They informed me that 15 have been abducted," Ansari said by telephone from his home town of Jacobabad in southern Pakistan.
"I and four of my friends managed to flee as we were outside Osh when trouble started. When we returned, there was fire all over," he said, adding the situation in Osh was "very dangerous".
Russia sent hundreds of paratroopers to Kyrgyzstan on Sunday to protect its military facilities, Interfax reported, as ethnic clashes spread to Jalalabad and the countryside.
Ethnic Uzbeks in a besieged neighborhood of Osh said gangs, aided by the military, were carrying out genocide, burning residents out of their homes and shooting them as they fled. Witnesses saw bodies lying on the streets.
Interfax news agency, citing a security source, said a battalion of Russian paratroopers had arrived in the country on Sunday to help protect Russian military facilities. A Russian army battalion is usually around 400 men, but Interfax referred to a "reinforced battalion", which can include as many as 650 troops.
"The mission of the force that has landed is to reinforce the defense of Russian military facilities and ensure security of Russian military servicemen and their families," the source was quoted as saying.
"God help us! They are killing Uzbeks like animals. Almost the whole city is in flames," Dilmurad Ishanov, an ethnic Uzbek human rights worker, told Reuters by telephone from Osh.
"Residents are calling us and saying soldiers are firing at them. There's an order to shoot the marauders, but they aren't shooting them," said ex-parliamentary deputy Alisher Sabirov, a peacekeeping volunteer in Osh.
