Uzbekistan's state-run mosques told worshippers to look for "kamikazes" in their midst on Friday as a human rights group said it feared authorities would torture suspects detained during a week of violence.
Five years of stability in Central Asia's most populous state crumbled this week when a series of bomb blasts and shootings killed at least 43 people.
The violence in the capital Tashkent and ancient Silk Road oasis of Bukhara was swiftly blamed on Islamic militants by a government criticized in the West for clamping down on opposition, controlling religion and jailing dissidents.
"Muslims, be watchful," Tashkent's chief imam, Anvar Haji Tursunov, told a congregation of several thousand at his mosque just meters (yards) away from a market where two explosions from alleged suicide bombers killed six on Monday.
"The kamikazes are against Allah," he intoned. "If you see people like this around you, we must punish them together."
President Islam Karimov has tightly controlled the resurgence of Islam since the collapse of the Soviet Union. His picture hangs in the imam's office and in the classrooms of a nearby 16th century madrassah or religious school.
Human rights groups estimate Uzbekistan has jailed 7,000 Muslims who do not subscribe to state Islam and say the new violence is being used as a pretext to crack down even harder.
TORTURE THREAT
"Detainees held incommunicado in Uzbekistan are in immediate danger of torture," said Rachel Denber, Human Rights Watch Central Asia and Europe chief.
"The Uzbek government should stop targeting people for their religious affiliations and should immediately grant detainees access to family members and lawyers."
Human Rights Watch said it had evidence that at least 11 people who were mostly former religious prisoners or their relatives had been "arbitrarily" detained after the violence.
Other reports say the government had arrested around 30 people. A Reuters correspondent saw dozens of police searching apartment blocks on Friday in order, they said, to check resident's documents near the scene of a shoot-out on Tuesday.
It is the first time since bomb attacks hit Tashkent in 1999, one almost killing Karimov, that the ruling elite's tight grip on power has been shown to be under any remote threat.
"These forces wanted to show that they are there and that the stability that Islam Karimov boasts of does not exist," said Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie center think-tank in Moscow.
Although some Uzbek officials have said they are investigating a possible link to al Qaeda in the violence, the low-level nature of the blasts -- often killing only the alleged suicide bomber -- and the choice of unspectacular targets has led some to suggest homegrown extremists may be to blame.
Asked about the detention of Muslims, Imam Tursunov said in an interview the courts were right to jail extremists.
"They just want power," he said. "They don't know the Koran, they don't know Islam."