Men wearing Kyrgyz traffic policemen's uniforms shot and seriously wounded a Russian officer stationed at Russia's Kant air force base outside Bishkek, the Russian embassy in Kyrgyzstan said. The Russian embassy and Kyrgyz officials gave differing accounts of the incident. A Russian embassy official said four men in an unmarked vehicle blocked a private car carrying three Russian servicemen near the airbase, pulled the Russians out, threw them to the ground, began beating them and then shot one of them. "The embassy of Russia has expressed its concern over the incident," Press Secretary Viktor Kharchenko told Reuters. An officer in the Kyrgyz Ministry of Internal Affairs press service said the Russians had failed to stop at around 2 a.m. at a highway post on the road from Bishkek to Kant. "There was no attack, it was a justified pursuit because they did not comply with the traffic police, and there were warning shots," deputy spokesman Rakhmatillo Akhmedov told Reuters.
