Subway Blasts Kill Dozens in Moscow

[Richard]

And so it goes...

Richard

Subway Blasts Kill Dozens in Moscow
Clifford Levy, NYT, 29 Mar 2010

Female suicide bombers set off huge explosions during rush hour Monday morning in two subway stations in central Moscow, officials said, killing at least 35 people and raising fears that the Muslim insurgency in southern Russia was once again being brought to the country’s heart.

The first attack occurred as commuters were exiting a packed train at the Lubyanka station, which is near the headquarters of the F.S.B., the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B. Officials said they suspected that the attack there was intended as a message to the security services, which have helped lead the crackdown on Islamic extremism in Chechnya and other parts of the Caucasus region in southern Russia.

The two explosions spread panic throughout the capital as people searched for missing relatives and friends, and the authorities tried to determine whether more attacks were planned. The subway system, known as the Metro, is one of the world’s most extensive and well-managed, and it serves as a vital artery for Moscow’s commuters, carrying as many as 10 million people a day.

“The terrorist acts were carried out by two female terrorist bombers,” said Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov. “They happened at a time when there would be the maximum number of victims.”

Mr. Luzhkov said 23 people were killed in the first explosion, at the Lubyanka station, and 12 people were killed 40 minutes later in a blast at the Park Kultury station. Dozens were injured.

(cont'd)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/wo...er=rss&emc=rss

[98G]

Lubyanka was my stop. The old KGB building made the stop infamous, but it is an upscale part of the center of Moscow these days. It is an expensive shopping and office district as well as where Moscow City Government houses their youth entrepreneurial and sports clubs.

Those two stops both have a slightly more upscale base of people using the metro.

[Five-O]

Hopefully the Russians will do what needs to be done....with vigor.

[Richard]

Hopefully the Russians will do what needs to be done....with vigor.

A long standing problem.

http://www.flashpoints.info/countrie...a_briefing.htm

Richard

[Sigaba]

Officials said they suspected that the attack there was intended as a message to the security services, which have helped lead the crackdown on Islamic extremism in Chechnya and other parts of the Caucasus region in southern Russia.

A message to the security services or a message from the security services? <<LINK>>

[akv]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

A message to the security services or a message from the security services?

A fair point Sigaba, Putin's no Boy Scout. I found the below interesting, though hard to agree with since, it doesn't address Chechen views towards the West, and it seems a lot of the bad ones we face in Iraq and Afghanistan are Chechen?

Russia: Shared scourge, different causes
Russia's dirty war is not over after all. And, as so often, the innocent are the first to suffer

The Guardian, Tuesday 30 March 2010

The parallels are written in the blood of the innocent. On a day much like any other, suicide bombers descend into the underground system of a major European city in the midst of the morning rush hour. They board a crowded train, crammed with commuters. They detonate their explosives. The impact is indiscriminate and lethal, in many cases life ending, in all others life changing. For a while, chaos reigns in the city. Then come the calls for action and the pledges of revenge. Five years ago the city was London. Yesterday morning it was Moscow.

What happened yesterday at two Moscow underground stations was barbaric. Violence of this kind against innocent people is intolerable wherever it occurs. Quite rightly, there is a reflexive sense of solidarity between those who have suffered from terrorist outrages. Many Londoners know what many Muscovites have just experienced. Countries such as Britain, Spain and India, all of which have endured long and difficult battles against their own terrorists, as well as lethal terror attacks on their urban transport systems, have lessons – mistakes as well as successes – to share with the Russians.

Our societies face a similar scourge. But we do not face a common enemy. It is important that we do not pretend otherwise, not least because the world is riddled with indefensible actions taken by states with varying degrees of justification in the name of a common struggle against terrorism. Most terrorism has local not global roots and most solutions are local too. The logic, if that is the right word, of the bombings lies in several previous attacks over the past decade and in Moscow's often ruthless and occasionally incompetent responses to them. This in turn is rooted in the bitter nexus of Moscow's relationship with its subject territories in the north Caucacus, a relationship that stretches back beyond the Soviet era to the imperial age. The bombers' choice of the Lubyanka underground station, underneath the headquarters of the FSB security police, as a target was surely very deliberate.

At the very least yesterday's bombs question Russian claims to have quelled the insurgencies in the north Caucasus. A brutal stability may now exist by comparison with the era of the Chechen wars, but it has been achieved at the cost of massive and ongoing human rights violations. Yesterday's bombings follow last month's escalation of Russian action against insurgents in Ingushetia, which killed the suspected leader of the team that bombed the Moscow to St Petersburg express train in November. Rebels duly threatened reprisals that now seem to have occurred in the Moscow Metro. Russia's dirty war is not over after all. And, as so often, the innocent are the first to suffer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...bers-editorial

[Crue]

Another bomb in Russia

http://af.reuters.com/article/worldN...62U0M120100331

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A bomb exploded in the centre of the town of Kizlyar in Russia's turbulent North Caucasus region of Dagestan Wednesday, causing casualties, Itar-Tass news agency quoted police as saying.
The blast occurred near a cinema, the agency said. It gave no further details.

Monday, twin suicide bombings killed 39 people on Moscow's metro underground rail network.

The deadliest attack in the Russian capital in six years fuelled fears of a broader offensive by rebels based in the North Caucasus and underscored the Kremlin's failure to keep militants in check.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who led Moscow into a war against Chechen separatists in 1999 that sealed his rise to power, said Tuesday that those behind the bombings must be scraped "from the bottom of the sewers" and exposed.

Moscow observed a day of mourning Tuesday for the victims of the blasts, which authorities said were set off by female suicide bombers linked to the North Caucasus -- a string of heavily Muslim provinces that includes Chechnya.

[incarcerated]

Originally Posted by Crue

Another bomb in Russia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8596084.stm

Twelve killed by twin bombings in Russia's Dagestan

Wednesday, 31 March 2010 10:06 UK
At least 12 people, including a top local police official, have been killed by two suicide bombings in Russia's North Caucasus republic of Dagestan.

A car bomb was detonated at about 0830 (0430 GMT) outside the offices of the local interior ministry and the FSB security agency in the town of Kizlyar.

Another bomber then blew himself up 20 minutes later as a crowd gathered.....

The BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow says that although it is too early to say whether there is a link between the attacks in Dagestan and Moscow, they both bear the hallmarks of previous suicide bombings carried out by Islamist militants from the restive region.

Last month, Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov warned that his fighters' "zone of military operations will be extended to the territory of Russia... the war is coming to their cities".

'Cancerous tumour'

In Wednesday's attacks, the first suicide bomber detonated his explosives when police tried to stop his car as he drove into the centre of Kizlyar, Dagestani Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said.

"Traffic police followed the car and almost caught up - at that time the blast hit," he told local television.

As police, emergency services personnel and residents gathered at the scene, a suicide bomber wearing a police uniform approached and blew himself up, killing among others the town's chief of police, Col Vitaly Vedernikov, Mr Nurgaliyev added.

A total of nine police officers were among the dead, the investigative committee of Russian prosecutors said in a statement. Twenty-three people were injured.....

[incarcerated]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8603119.stm

Ingushetia hit by suicide attack

Monday, 5 April 2010 07:37 UK
A suicide attacker has killed at least two police officers in the Russian republic of Ingushetia, in the latest in a series of such bombings.

Shortly after the first attack, a car bomb was detonated in the same place in the town of Karabulak, officials said....

[Richard]

And so it goes...

Richard

Second Bomber in Moscow Attacks Is Identified
Clifford Levy, NYT, 6 Apr 2010

The second female suicide bomber who attacked the Moscow subway system last week was a 28-year-old teacher from a predominantly Muslim region of southern Russia who was married to an extremist leader, officials said on Tuesday.

The woman, Maryam Sharipova, was first identified by her father, and genetic tests confirmed that she carried out the attack during the morning rush hour on March 29. Ms. Sharipova was from the Dagestan region, in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, as was the other suicide bomber, a 17-year-old woman whose name was released last Friday.

Ms. Sharipova is believed to have been the suicide bomber at the Lubyanka station in central Moscow, a site apparently chosen because it is next to the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the K.G.B.

(cont'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/wo...moscow.html?hp

[Harpy]

Is this Caucasus Emirate group active in Af-Pak? I know Chechens were trained in Pak earlier and some have attacked India, but are they still coming to attack NATO troops?

Somewhat curious as it seems from Anzer Astemirov's statements that they are hinting for help from the West!