KHOJA-OBOD, Uzbekistan, June 15, 2010 (AFP) - Struck mute after being brutally gang raped, three sisters -- refugees from the violence in Kyrgyzstan -- sobbed wildly as a doctor narrated the horror they had endured.
From their broken stories, Doctor Mukaddas Majidova said the girls, aged between 16 and 23, had been raped in front of each other by a mob of ethnic Kyrgyz men and were rendered speechless by the trauma.
"These girls were raped recently and by a lot of men and for several hours, according to their injuries," she told AFP.
Majidova and other doctors in eastern Uzbekistan's Andijan border region are struggling to treat the flood of tens of thousands of terror-stricken refugees fleeing five days of bloody clashes in Kyrgyzstan.
Every new patient told a horrifying story, they said.
"We treated today a 28-year-old man who was tortured. He had signs of knife wounds on his neck, burned skin from scalding water and had been shot. We took out the bullet," said Kozim Mahkamov, a doctor at the hospital in Andijan city.
In numerous accounts both by Uzbek officials and Kyrgyzstan refugees a horrifying picture of mass rape and killings emerged.
After herself hiding in a cemetery with her child to escape marauding ethnic Kyrgyz mobs overnight Friday, Rano Juraboyeva said she witnessed the rape and mass killing of an entire Uzbek family -- her former neighbours.
"I took my child and went into the street but there were a lot of Kyrgyz men on horseback, shouting 'Uzbeks come out!'" Juraboyeva told AFP after gaining the safety of a refugee camp across the border in the town of Yorkishlok.
She said the Primatov family -- Ismoil, his wife Ortikhon and sons Ravshan, Islom, Rustam -- were dragged out of their house in the village of Kapa on the outskirts of Osh city, which saw the worst of the ethnic bloodshed.
"They stripped naked the parents, then raped the mother in front of the children. After, they shot the children in front of the parents, then killed the parents too," Juraboyeva told AFP.
On a visit to hastily set up border refugee camps, Uzbekistan's Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Aripov said Monday that "three young girls between the ages of 11 and 13, who were raped in front of their parents," had been admitted to hospital.
Uzbekistan has issued an urgent plea for international aid to cope with estimates of up to 100,000 refugees now inside the country as it strives to cope with the escalating humanitarian catastrophe.
The Central Asian state restricted access across its border to all but wounded, sick, pregnant and elderly refugees Monday, leaving thousands marooned on the Kyrgyz side.
An AFP reporter saw two young boys with critical burns handed to Uzbek doctors through the iron fences at the Yorkishlok border post on Tuesday.
Burns disfigured the face of one of the boys, aged four and eight, who were without relatives, carried by other refugees to the border.
"This boy was burnt when the Kyrgyz set fire to their house," Doctor Mirkomil Otakhodjaev said, receiving the stricken boys across the border.
But some 500 would-be refugees, mostly women and children, stood still screaming for help on the Kyrgyz side. "It's an Uzbek genocide," they shouted and hoisted a make-shift banner pleading: "Please Help Uzbeks!"
"I'm worried about my husband. He is still in Kyrgyzstan, I don't know where," Mukkaddas said at a hospital in the Khoja-Obod district of Uzbekistan.
Ismail, another refugee being treated for a gunshot wound through the back, said he had been shot by a sniper as he tried to help evacuate women and children from a besieged Uzbek neighbourhood in Osh.
"There are snipers on top of all the high buildings," he told AFP. "When we started to evacuate the women, we were shot from behind. Armed people chased us and shot at us."
Uzbeks make up 14 percent of the population of 5.3 million in Kyrgyzstan, where violence in the southern region over the last five days has claimed at least 170 lives.