The ousted Kyrgyz president ruled out on...

"I do not believe that Russia or the United States of America had a hand in these events," AFP news agency quoted Kurmanbek Bakiyev as saying on Friday. He declined to elaborate.

His comments were at odds with previous remarks made in an interview with Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy on Thursday that he could not exclude the role of other countries in organizing popular protests that sparked the coup.

Although the ousted Kyrgyz leader did not name any country that might have organized the events, he said "such a coordinated operation could not have been carried out without foreign help."

Both Russia and the United States have vested interests in Kyrgyzstan. Russia has been angered by the presence of the U.S. military base in Manas, used by the United States for its operations in Afghanistan.

In February, 2009 Kyrgyzstan ordered the base to be shut down, a step widely seen to be influenced by Moscow, which had just granted Kyrgyzstan a large financial

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