Twelve killed by twin bombings in Russia's Dagestan
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.
Russia is on alert after double suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro on
Monday morning, which left 39 people dead. First funerals of some of the
victims took place on Wednesday. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called
on the security forces to "scrape from the sewers" those responsible for
the Moscow attacks. Investigators say they believe the bombers were linked
to militants in the North Caucasus.
At a government meeting following Wednesday's bombings in Dagestan,
Mr Putin condemned the "terrorist act" and said he did "not rule out that
it is one and the same gang at work". President Dmitry Medvedev said the
two sets of bombings were "links of the same chain".
A militant Islamist group led by a Chechen rebel on Wednesday denied
responsibility for the blasts. "We did not carry out the attack in Moscow,
and we don't know who did it," Shemsettin Batukaev, a spokesman for
the Caucasus Emirate organisation led by Doku Umarov, told Reuters by
telephone in Turkey. The spokesman added that the group had planned
attacks on economic targets inside Russia, but not against civilians.
Last month, 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".
The BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow says that although no-one has yet
claimed responsibility for either of this week's attacks, both bear the
hallmarks of previous suicide bombings carried out by Islamist militants
from the North Caucasus.
'Cancerous tumour'
In Wednesday's attacks, the first bomber detonated about 200kg of 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.
Mobile phone footage posted on the internet afterwards showed the moment of the
second blast, with officials walking past a damaged building before a loud bang rings
out and smoke rises in the distance. 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.
Mr Nurgaliyev later ordered police to increase security at official buildings across the
republic, as well as at places where crowds gather, including schools, colleges and
cinemas. Dagestani President Magomedsalam Magomedov said the explosions in
Moscow and Kizlyar were linked and he vowed to "eliminate" the perpetrators,
Russia's Interfax news agency reported.
Kizlyar is close to Dagestan's border with Chechnya, where Russian forces have
fought two wars against separatists since 1994 that claimed more than 100,000
lives and left the republic in ruins. Chechnya has in recent years been more peaceful,
but the fighting has spread to Dagestan and Ingushetia, where a violent Islamist
insurgency is growing.
Correspondents say poverty, unemployment and the brutal tactics of the security
forces have been factors in driving young men into the ranks of Islamist rebel groups,
which want to drive the Russians out.
President Medvedev recently said separatists had spread through the North Caucasus
"like a cancerous tumour" and earlier this year appointed a deputy prime minister to
oversee the troubled region. He told security officials on Tuesday that the militants'
goal was the "destabilisation of the situation in the country, the destruction of civil
society, and to sow fear and panic among the population".
Mourning
On Tuesday, Russians observed a day of mourning for those killed in the suicide
bombings on Moscow's Metro, carried out by two women said to have links to the
North Caucasus. The first bomb tore through a carriage of a train at Lubyanka station -
beneath the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB) - as it stood waiting
for commuters during the morning rush hour. The second explosion, six stops away
at Park Kultury, was about 40 minutes later. It hit the back of the train as people got on.
The co-ordinated attacks were the deadliest in Moscow since February 2004.
Russian media reports are linking them to the death earlier this month of a
rebel leader from Ingushetia - Alexander Tikhomirov, also known as Said
Buryatskiy - who was blamed for an attack on a train from Moscow to St
Petersburg last year that killed 26 people.
The newspaper Kommersant quoted security sources as saying they believed
Tikhomirov had recruited 30 potential suicide attackers, and that two of them
might have avenged his death.