Wild rumours of more violence flew through Kyrgyzstan’s ravaged south Saturday, stoking tensions in a region on edge after the worst ethnic clashes since the collapse of the Soviet Union. “On Saturday, the Army will clean out the Uzbek districts,” warned a hotel owner who gave his name only as Bakha. “The Kyrgyz state will attack us to carry out a genocide,” predicted Bakhtiyar Akhmedov, an Uzbek man living in a district where makeshift barricades still stand outside homes.

Some 100,000 minority Uzbeks fleeing a purge by mobs of Kyrgyz massed at the border on Monday, an Uzbek leader said, as the deadliest ethnic violence to hit this Central Asian nation in decades left a