Bus attack by woman bomber kills 17 in Russia

Russia: A woman suicide bomber blew up a bus carrying Russian air force staff yesterday, killing 17 people and injuring 16 more close to the border with Chechnya, a day before parliamentarians gathered for a final vote on an amnesty for the region's separatist rebels.

The attack underlined the rebels' determination to continue their fight for independence from Moscow and disregard a controversial referendum in March that the Kremlin said proved Chechens' desire to remain within the Russian Federation.

Witnesses said the unnamed bomber tried to get on the bus as it collected passengers in the republic of North Ossetia. When the driver refused to let her board, she ignited explosives strapped to her body, reducing the bus to a mangled wreck and spraying the area with shards of metal.

Russian television showed bodies lined up on the blood-soaked tarmac beside the shattered bus, one side of which was riddled with shrapnel holes.

Officials said the victims were military and civilian staff heading for work at the Mozdok airbase, from where planes and helicopters fly sorties over Chechnya.

The early morning attack was the third suicide bombing involving a woman in or near Chechnya in the last month. On May 12th a woman was part of a group that drove a truck packed with explosives into a government complex in northern Chechnya, killing 59 people. Two days later a woman blew herself up at a festival in the republic, killing at least 16 people.

Russian officials immediately alleged that the rise in such attacks proved the growing influence of international terrorist groups on Chechnya's rebels.

"Unfortunately this is not an isolated phenomenon, it has been brought here from other countries. There never used to be suicide bombers involved in the Chechen conflict," Russian Prosecutor General Mr Vladimir Ustinov told President Vladimir Putin during a televised meeting.

Mr Sergei Ignatchenko, spokesman for Russia's FSB security service, said the suicide attacks bore the hallmark of Al-Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups.

"According to our information, the suicide bombers are trained abroad, where specialist psychologists work with them until they are ready to die gladly. Then they are sent to Chechnya," he told state-run Channel One television.

At last weekend's summit in St Petersburg, Russia's second city, the European Union and United States both backed Mr Putin's efforts to launch a peace process in Chechnya, despite rebels' contempt for it and locals' deep distrust of Russian troops in the mostly-Muslim republic.

The guerrillas denounced as rigged a Kremlin-arranged referendum that gave overwhelming backing in March to a constitution tying Chechnya to the rest of Russia. Many rights and democracy groups said a representative poll was impossible in a region where rebels still kill soldiers every day and civilians accuse federal forces of murder, rape and torture.