RUSSIA: Suspected Chechen suicide bombers killed 40 people and injured 146 when they blew up a train in southern Russia yesterday, in what the Kremlin called a rebel attempt to rattle the country ahead of tomorrow's parliamentary elections.
Security officials blamed Chechnya's separatists for the blast, which ripped through the train near the town of Yessentuki, tearing one carriage to pieces, derailing others and scattering bodies and debris across the track.
Guerrillas blew up another train on the same Kislovodsk-Mineralnye Vody line in September, killing six people and injuring 32. In both attacks, most of the victims were students going to college in Pyatigorsk, one of several spa towns in the northern Caucasus that tourists have all but abandoned since war convulsed Chechnya in 1994.
Mr Nikolai Patrushev, head of the FSB domestic security service, said a suspected bomber's body was found with grenades still strapped to his legs, and a female suspect was badly injured in the early-morning explosion. He said two other women leapt from the train just before the blast.
"Today's crime is undoubtedly an attempt to destabilise the situation in the country on the eve of parliamentary elections," said President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy and FSB chief. "I am sure the criminals will achieve nothing. Russians themselves will not allow this."
National television showed rescuers lifting the dead and injured from the wreckage, and bomb-disposal officers blowing up an unexploded grenade on the track. Behind them brightly coloured blankets covered a row of bodies.
Eyewitnesses said the blast shook the surrounding area. "The blast was so strong that it smashed all the windows," an elderly woman told First Channel television. "I felt as though I had been picked up and put back down again."
Mr Gleb Kovalenko told Rossiya state television the blast had occurred inside the carriage. Smoke and ash covered the area around the wreck.
Mr Boris Gryzlov, Interior Minister and leader of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, said of yesterday's attackers: "We will find those who did this. The ground will burn under their feet. These animals will never be able to feel safe."
United Russia is expected to win tomorrow's poll, after using state-controlled television to dominate an election campaign that has barely touched on Chechnya, where Moscow's troops are fighting their second war in a decade with guerrillas.
Chechnya's rebels did not accept responsibility for the bombing, suggesting instead on their kavkazcenter.com website that the FSB might have staged the attack to rally election support for Mr Putin.
They made the same charge during his campaign for the Presidency in 2000, after 246 people died in a string of apartment bombings that he blamed on the guerrillas, vowing to destroy them if he won election to the Kremlin.
More than three years later Russian soldiers still die daily in Chechnya, but rebels have not staged any major attempts on civilians since a series of suicide attacks that killed more than 150 people between May and September.
The separatists rejected as farcical a March referendum that Moscow said proved Chechens' desire remain within the Russian Federation, and an election for a regional president in October that saw the Kremlin's candidate romp home almost unopposed.
Russian and international rights groups, who accuse federal forces and rebels in Chechnya of torture, rape and murder, said both polls were rigged.
Mr Putin has sought approval for his Chechnya campaign by including it in the so-called international war on terror, insisting that separatist forces receive funding from extremist Islamic groups like al-Qaeda.
"This morning's crime shows that international terrorism, which today assails very many countries, continues to be a serious threat to our country too," Mr Putin said.