Uzbekistan declined to send its defence minister to a NATO ministerial meeting on Thursday, and a NATO official said the alliance was reviewing its ties with the country following killings there last month. But Russia resisted NATO calls for an independent inquiry into the deaths of at least 173 people. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov refused to condemn Tashkent for the killings by troops who opened fire to quell an uprising. Uzbekistan is a member of NATO\'s Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and entitled to attend such meetings, but the official said Tashkent had sent a message saying the defence minister could not attend due to other commitments. The former Soviet Uzbekistan says most of those killed in the eastern town of Andizhan were terrorists. The independent Human Rights Watch said it as a massacre in which Uzbek troops fired indiscriminately on a crowd. NATO followed the United Nations in urging Tashkent to allow an independent international inquiry, which Uzbekistan rejected. The alliance\'s Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer raised the issue with Ivanov at a meeting between NATO and Russia, but made it clear their views were miles apart. \"I cannot say we agree on all elements because we do not agree,\" he told a news conference. \"On the point of NATO joining the international chorus for an independent international inquiry, that is not the Russian position.” He said, “ We are also concerned by this, but in contrast to others we do not intend to condemn or accuse anyone. We are not going to come to any hasty conclusions about what happened.\" Two NATO members, the United States and Germany, have leased airbases and facilities at Khanabad and Termez in Uzbekistan, and use them to support peacekeeping operations in neighbouring Afghanistan. So far NATO has stopped short of threatening to suspend its \"partnership for peace\" accord with Tashkent, an arrangement it has with several other ex-Soviet states. However, following the killings in Andizhan, NATO has already postponed some seminars and other meetings with Uzbekistan to make the point it was not business as usual. (Reuters)