At one point Sunday, the Tatars set off for Simferopol in a convoy of about 100 vehicles, but were blocked by armored personnel carriers about 50 kilometers east of the Crimean capital.
All-night negotiations led by Crimean Prime Minister Anatoly Franchuk ended the standoff with the 600 Tatars. Both sides agreed to form a commission to investigate the rioting and the deaths.
Crimean Tatars, numbering around 250,000 or one-tenth of Crimea's population, have had poor relations with the ethnic Russians who dominate the Black Sea peninsula. But Tatars said the rioting had nothing to do with that conflict.
The rioters were protesting corruption among Crimean police, which Tatars believe led to the slaying of two Tatar market vendors Friday.
Mustafa Dzhemi-lev, a Tatar leader, said the two were killed by racketeers after refusing to pay bribes to police.
"We are very worried that this is going to be depicted as an interethnic conflict,'' Dzhemilev said. "But what we are angered about is that local authorities have sold out to the mafia.''
After the funeral of the vendors Sunday, a large group of angry Crimean Tatars burned down a house, bombed a restaurant and attacked stores in Kurortnaya, Feodosia, Sudak, Shebetovna, Koktebel, and Novisvet.
They ran through the streets with stones, sticks and Molotov cocktails, destroying businesses suspected of ties to the local mafia, Dzhemilev said.
Riot police then opened fire on the group's 100-odd vehicles outside Sudak, killing two Tatars and wounding 10.
In Feodosia, the rioters took the local police chief hostage, but released him before heading to Simferopol.
Armored vehicles and heavily armed troops from Ukraine's National Guard are checking all cars entering the capital.
Meanwhile, the Crimean government issued a statement Monday appealing for calm, saying it was ready to cooperate with Tatar leaders in investigating the crisis.
The Tatars still consider Russians their historic enemy, and oppose the efforts of some Crimean leaders to break away from Ukraine and reunite with Russia.
The entire Crimean Tatar population of about 180,000 was branded as Nazi collaborators by Josef Stalin, a charge that continues to haunt them. They were deported in cattle trucks overnight in 1944, and their property was confiscated. Tens of thousands died in transit and from disease. They began returning to the Crimea in the final days of the Soviet Union.
The violence was the worst since the 1991 collapse of communism in Ukraine almost entirely spared the ethnic clashes which have convulsed other parts of the former Soviet Union.
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