Andijan, Uzbekistan ? An estimated 500 bodies have been laid out in a school in the eastern Uzbek city where troops fired on a crowd of protesters to put down an uprising, a doctor said early today, corroborating witness accounts of hundreds killed in the fighting.

The doctor, who said she had seen the bodies, said residents were coming to Andijan’s School No. 15 to identify dead relatives, who had been placed in rows. Soldiers were guarding the school, said the doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The doctor also said she believed some 2,000 people were wounded in the clashes on Friday, but it wasn’t clear how she arrived at that estimate.

Thousands of terrified Uzbeks trying to flee into Kyrgyzstan burned a government building Saturday and attacked border guards, a second day of violence triggered by a brazen jail break to free accused Islamic militants and a massive demonstration against economic conditions under the iron-fisted rule of President Islam Karimov.

There was no immediate word on casualties in Saturday’s violence in this former republic of the ex-Soviet Union. Witnesses on Friday had said 200 to 300 people were killed in the gunfire; the doctor’s report of 500 dead raised that estimate.

Andijan is Uzbekistan’s fourth-largest city, about 30 miles from the country’s easternmost border in the narrow finger of territory that protrudes deep into Kyrgyzstan, where an uprising in late March ousted that country’s only post-Soviet leader.

The Uzbek unrest began overnight Friday when protesters freed as many as 2,000 prisoners, including the 23 members of the Akramia Islamic group on trial on charges of being members of a group allied with the outlawed radical Islamic party Hizb-ut-Tahrir. It seeks to create a worldwide Islamic state and has been forced underground throughout most of Central Asia and Russia.

Karimov’s hardline secular regime has a long history of repressing Muslims who worship outside state-approved mosques.

In the course of Friday, thousands of people swarmed into the streets of Andijan, clashing with police and seizing the administration building, which was later taken back by government forces. Demonstrators did not call for the ouster of Karimov but instead complained bitterly about the dire economic conditions