moscowtheatre

Pictures of 2002 Moscow hostage-taking...more than 118 lives lost (@750 saved). Urest elsewhere and in Caucasus
All 50 terrorists dead. Before dawn, two hostages killed, Russian forces re-take theatre...questions as to what the Russian Special Forces used to put terrorists and their captives to sleep..."BZ" suggested in Reuters article--opium derivative actually the item used, we find out later. Terrorism attacks create links and bonds anew in 2009? Yup (train bombing, November 2009). And 2010 it continues. On-site home video - Lubyanka Station.

The Horror of Subway: The horror of Moscow, Russia subway in the works of Alex Andreev...“It’s forbidden to make shots in Moscow subway, there are everywhere signs warning not to take pictures and cops checking that everyone obide this. Especially nice shots come out late at night.” Some cockroaches couldn’t run away when the flash was turned on, perhaps. (Homage to Gregor Samsa from Kafka?) Lubyanka Station is where the Lubyanka Prison/KGB used to be, we think, if our Ian Flemming/James Bond reading of "From Russia With Love" was correct. There are passages in the novel which suggest the photo taken near that station, shown in the NYTIMES photo with helicopter!

Russia kills Moscow metro attacks mastermind
YAHOO
by Stuart Williams
21 August 2010

MOSCOW (AFP) – Russian security forces Saturday killed a top militant suspected of organising the deadly attacks on the Moscow metro and who was reportedly married to one of the female suicide bombers.

Magomedali Vagabov was killed in a clash with security forces in the Caucasus region of Dagestan that left four other militants dead, the national anti-terror committee said in a statement published by Russian news agencies.

The double bombings carried out by two female suicide bombers on the Moscow metro on March 29 killed 40 and wounded more than 100.

"Vagabov was the organiser of the suicide bombings on the Moscow metro, was actively involved in recruiting youth for the underground and organised the training for the suicide bombers," the committee said.

He was described in the official statement as the number two figure in the Islamist-inspired insurgency that has plagued the Russian Northern Caucasus over the last years, after its overall leader Doku Umarov.

The clash, described as being brief, took place in the village of Gunib -- in the mountains of Dagestan southwest of the local capital Makhachkala -- where the militants were holed up in a house.

"Once the fire from the building was put out, one of the corpses was identified as Magomedali Vagabov," the statement said.

According to some reports, Vagabov was the husband of Mariam Sharipova, one of the metro suicide bombers.

This has been strongly denied by her father in media interviews but the Russian news agency reports described her as Vagabov's "sharia wife", implying he had made her one of a number of spouses.

Sharipova blew herself up at Moscow's Lubyanka metro station in the early morning rush hour followed by her accomplice Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova who detonated her charge shortly afterwards at the Park Kulturi station.

As well as the Moscow metro attacks, Vagabov had also planned a string of attacks against security forces and on railway infrastructure, the statement said.

It said he had received training at a militant camp in Pakistan and had contacts with a number of international terror groups who had also passed on financing.

"The annihilation of the well-known bandit Vagabov and his henchmen is a success for the security forces and shows even the most sophisticated means will not allow bandits to escape responsibility for their deeds," it said.

There were no casualties among the security forces or the civilian population in the village.

The Russian security forces had targeted Vagabov in previous special operations but had until now failed to track him down. Russian media reported at the time of the attacks he lead a 40-strong group in the forested mountains.

Not all however were convinced by the proud statements by the authorities over the killing.

"It's not like we've captured Osama bin Laden, we've liquidated some bandit who was not only unknown to the man in the street but also to MPs who do not specialise in the underground," said Gennady Gudkov, deputy head of the lower house of parliament's security committee.

"Despite the successes of the special services, the sources who form the underground have not been exhausted," he told the RIA Novosti news agency.

The Kremlin fought two wars against separatist rebels in Chechnya in the 1990s but the insurgency has now become more Islamist in tone and has spread to neighbouring Ingushetia and Dagestan.

A top rebel in Chechnya was killed separately Saturday by special forces, officials said, naming him as Khamzat Chemilev, alias the "emir of Grozny", accused of carrying out attacks on markets in the city in 2009 and 2010.

They said he was trapped in his house and told to surrender, but burst out firing an automatic weapon and throwing hand grenades before blowing himself himself up.

Two media workers in Dagestan -- Abubark Rizvanov, the director of Khuda-media, and his deputy Timur Kurbanmagomedov -- were meanwhile reported missing Saturday after being followed for several days by unknown men.

Putin: Bombing masterminds will be caught
Washington Times
David Nowak ASSOCIATED PRESS
Originally published 04:00 a.m., March 30, 2010, updated 10:20 a.m., March 30, 2010

UPDATED:

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vowed Tuesday to "drag out of the sewer" the masterminds of the twin suicide bombings of the Moscow subway system that killed 39 people and left scores wounded. Mr. Putin spoke as Russia mourned the dead from Monday's attacks; teary passengers lit candles and left carnations at both of the central stations that were hit. The blasts shocked a country that had grown accustomed to such violence being confined to a restive southern corner -- and marked the return of terrorism to the everyday lives of Muscovites after a six-year break.

As senior politicians called for the return of the death penalty, the attacks raised fears that civil liberties again may be sacrificed under the pretext of fighting terrorism, a charge Mr. Putin faced during his eight-year presidency.

"I understand what authorities will do. They will resume persecution of opposition; there will be more censorship, political spying. There will be more riot police dispersing opposition rallies and protests, but it will not save us from terrorism," prominent opposition leader Boris Nemtsov said in an editorial published by Grani.ru online magazine.

As president, Mr. Putin consolidated control in the wake of the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis by abolishing the election of regional governors, and he came to power in 1999 promising a strong crackdown on rebels in Russia's North Caucasus. Mr. Putin said on television Tuesday that he is sure the organizers of Monday's attacks by two women will be found.

"We know that they are lying low, but it is already a matter of the pride of law enforcement agencies to drag them out of the sewer and into broad daylight."

Many have speculated that the blasts -- blamed on Muslim extremists in the Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya -- were retaliation for the recent killing of separatist leaders in the area by Russian police. No claims of responsibility have been made. The city remained on edge Tuesday, even as people began to commute on the subway again.

"I feel the tension on the metro. Nobody's smiling or laughing," said university student Alina Tsaritova, not far from the Lubyanka station, one of the targets.

The female suicide bombers detonated belts of explosives during the morning rush hour at the stations, investigators said. Five people remained in critical condition out of 71 hospitalized after the blasts, city health department official Andrei Seltsovsky told the Rossiya-24 state news channel. Emergency officials said later Tuesday that five bodies remained unidentified.

Some commuters said Tuesday they would try to block the events out of their mind completely.

"We have to live with this, not to think about it, especially when we're underground," said Tatyana Yerofeyeva, a Muscovite in her early 50s.

As public outrage swells, the upper house of Parliament is proposing bringing back the death penalty for such crimes, a lawmaker was quoted as saying.

"This is our reaction to yesterday's tragic events," Anatoly Kyskov, the Federation Council's legal committee chairman, said in comments carried by state news agency RIA Novosti.

President Dmitry Medvedev called on chairmen from the Supreme Court and the High Court of Arbitration to propose ways to "perfect" terrorism laws.

Russia announced a moratorium on capital punishment when it joined the Council of Europe in 1996 and pledged to abolish it, but has not done so. The Kremlin-controlled Parliament has been reluctant to fully outlaw executions because of broad public support for the death penalty. As Moscow mourned, plastic plaques hung in the two metro stations above rickety tables overflowing with flowers; their inscriptions promised permanent replacements. Some people were choked by tears as they laid candles.

Flags flew at half staff on government buildings, at the Kremlin and in other cities across the vast country. Entertainment events and television shows were canceled, and services were scheduled at several churches.
Heightened transportation security remained in effect across the capital and elsewhere. Police with machine guns and sniffer dogs patrolled subway entrances. Later, jittery authorities evacuated 45 residents of a central Moscow apartment building over a suspicious-looking object found under a police vehicle nearby, Russian media said.

Monday's first explosion took place just before 8 a.m. at the Lubyanka station in central Moscow, beneath the notorious headquarters of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which is the KGB's main successor agency. The FSB is a symbol of power under Mr. Putin, a former KGB officer who headed the agency before his election as president in 2000. About 45 minutes later, a second blast hit the Park Kultury station on the same subway line, which is near the renowned Gorky Park. In both cases, the bombs were detonated as the trains pulled into the stations and the doors were opening.

The last confirmed terrorist attack in Moscow was in August 2004, when a suicide bomber blew herself up outside a subway station, killing 10 people. Chechen rebels claimed responsibility.

Associated Press writer Mansur Mirovalev contributed to this report.

Subway Blasts Kill Dozens in Moscow
NYTIMES
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
March 29, 2010

MOSCOW — Female suicide bombers set off huge explosions in two subway stations in central Moscow during the Monday morning rush hour, Russian officials said, killing more than three dozen 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 a station 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 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 at the Park Kultury station. At least two others died later. More than 100 people were injured. There were no immediate claims of responsibility.

Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, the country’s paramount leader, cut short a trip to Siberia, returning to Moscow to oversee the federal response. Mr. Putin built his reputation in part on his success at suppressing terrorism, so the attacks could be considered a challenge to his stature.

Mr. Putin vowed that “the terrorists will be destroyed.”

President Dmitri A. Medvedev, Mr. Putin’s protégé, was in Moscow and was briefed on the blasts by top law enforcement and security advisers. Photographs showed scenes of devastation, with bodies strewn across subway cars and station platforms.

Pavel Y. Novikov, 25, an electrician, said he was evacuated from the Park Kultury station about 15 minutes after the explosion.

“It smelled like burned rubber,” he said. “I saw blood, and I saw bloody clothes on the ground. It was so horrible.”

Kirill Gribov, 20, a university student, said he was on a train that arrived at the Park Kultury station just as the suicide bomber detonated her explosive belt on the train across the platform.

“The explosion was so loud that we all were deafened,” Mr. Gribov said. “Then I remember a cloud of gas coming from the wrecked train in front of us, colored in pink, maybe because of blood. Some people were in panic, some stood still, but all of us somehow found our way outside the station. It was only at the street when I realized what had just happened. Mobile service was blocked, I couldn’t even call my parents, and I had to walk several kilometers because of the traffic.”

In the early part of the last decade, the subway system suffered several attacks related to the separatist war in Chechnya. With the explosions on Monday, Muscovites expressed renewed concerns that they might again become targets.

The earlier raft of attacks had repercussions far beyond the security situation in the Caucasus and rest of the country. In 2004, Mr. Putin, the president at the time, responded by greatly tightening control over the government, saying that the country had to be united against terrorism. He pushed through laws that eliminated the election of regional governors, turning them into appointees of the president, and that made it harder for independents to be elected to Parliament.

Officials said the first explosion on Monday occurred at 7:50 a.m. in second car of a train at the Lubyanka station, killing people on the platform and inside the train. The authorities closed off the station and the surrounding Lubyanka Square, formerly the site of the notorious Lubyanka prison, which was connected to the headquarters of the K.G.B. About 40 minutes later the second attack took place, in the third car of a train at the Park Kultury station, officials said.

Yuri Syomin, the Moscow city prosecutor, said investigators believe that both explosions were set off by female suicide bombers wearing belts packed with explosives. Crowds of people rushed to both stations in an effort to locate relatives, and cell phone networks became jammed. Streets in central Moscow were blocked with traffic as people avoided the subway system. At Lubyanka, a dark-haired woman stood helplessly at a subway station exit and dialed her sister over and over. She said she had been dialing for two hours. Her sister — like her, a recent immigrant from neighboring Kazakhstan — had left for her work at a laundry that morning and not been heard from since.

A middle-aged man, still searching for his wife, barked into a cell phone that the injured had been taken to the emergency room at Sklifosovsky Hospital. Lyudmila Samokatova was stationed at her newspaper stand a few feet from the subway station around 8 a.m. — the height of rush hour — when shaken passengers suddenly began to stream out of the station. One man, she said, was weeping and crossing himself, repeating, “Thank God, I’m alive.” She said they were more shocked than panicked, walking rather than running.

“I wanted to cry when I found out what happened,” Ms. Samokatova said. “There were women with children on that subway.”

The attacks marked the second major upsurge in terrorism on the Russian transportation system in the last year. In November 2009, a bomb in a rural area derailed a luxury train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing 26 people. The authorities have linked the attack to Muslim insurgents in the Ingushetia region, which is near Chechnya.

In February, a Chechen rebel leader, Doku Umarov, threatened in an interview on a Web site to organize terror acts in Russian population centers.

“If Russians think that the war is happening only on television, far from the Caucasus, and it will not touch them, then we are going to show them that this war will return to their homes,” he said.

The Russian government has sought to suppress violent Muslim extremism in the south since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Two brutal wars in Chechnya and a guerrilla insurgency gave rise to numerous bombings and acts of terror in southern Russia throughout the 1990s. Starting in 2002, Chechen separatists then began to export their bombing campaign to Moscow.

That October, a group of Chechen terrorists stormed into a Moscow theater during a performance and took some 850 actors, musicians and theatergoers hostage. After 57 hours of negotiations, Russian special forces launched an assault, killing all the militants and 117 of the hostages.

About 20 of the militants involved the theater siege were women, and several were wearing explosive vests. The following year, Chechen tacticians began using female suicide bombers in Moscow.

The first of those attacks came in July 2003, when the Russian authorities said a Chechen woman exploded a suicide belt at a rock concert, killing more than a dozen people. In what was to have been a coordinated attack, the police said, another woman’s explosives failed to detonate nearby.

In December 2003, a woman blew herself up in central Moscow, killing six people and injuring dozens. She was identified as the widow of a Chechen guerrilla commander, and the female bombers soon came to be known in Russia as the “black widows.”

In August 2004, a suicide bomber killed at least 9 other people and wounded more than 50 outside the Rizhskaya subway stop. In February of that same year, a woman carrying a bomb destroyed another subway car, killing at least 41 people as the train moved between the Paveletskaya and the Avtozavodskaya stations at one of the busiest times of the day.

Ellen Barry, Andrew E. Kramer, Michael Schwirtz and Yulia Taranova contributed reporting.

Double suicide bombings kill 37 on Moscow subway
YAHOO
By DAVID NOWAK, Associated Press Writer
29 March 2010

MOSCOW – Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up Monday in twin attacks on Moscow subway stations jam-packed with rush-hour passengers, killing at least 37 people and wounding 65, officials said. They blamed the carnage on rebels from the Caucasus region.

The blasts come six years after Caucasus Islamic separatists carried out a pair of deadly Moscow subway strikes and raise concerns that the war has once again come to Russia's capital, amid militants' warnings of a renewed determination to push their fight. Chechen rebels claimed responsibility for a deadly bombing late last year on a passenger train en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Last month, Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov warned in an interview on a rebel-affiliated Web site that "the zone of military operations will be extended to the territory of Russia ... the war is coming to their cities."

The first explosion took place just before 8 a.m. at the Lubyanka station in central Moscow. The station is underneath the building that houses the main offices of the Federal Security Service, the KGB's main successor agency.

About 45 minutes later, a second explosion hit the Park Kultury station, which is near the renowned Gorky Park.

"I heard a bang, turned my head and smoke was everywhere. People ran for the exits screaming," said 24-year-old Alexander Vakulov, who said he was on a train on the platform opposite the targeted train at Park Kultury.

"I saw a dead person for the first time in my life," said 19-year-old Valentin Popov, who had just arrived at the station from the opposite direction.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who built much of his political capital by directing a fierce war with Chechen separatists a decade ago, vowed Monday that "terrorists will be destroyed."

The iconic Moscow subway system is one of the world's busiest, carrying around 7 million passengers on an average workday, and is a key element in running the sprawling and traffic-choked city. Russian TV showed amateur video from inside the Lubyanka station of wounded and possibly dead victims sitting and lying on the floor. The train platform was filled with smoke. Outside both stations, passengers flooded out, many of them crying and making frantic calls on their cell phones. The wounded were loaded into ambulances and helicopters, some with their heads wrapped in bloody bandages, as sirens wailed.

The last confirmed terrorist attack in Moscow was in August 2004, when a suicide bomber blew herself up outside a city subway station, killing 10 people. Responsibility for that blast was claimed by Chechen rebels. Russian police have killed several Islamic militant leaders in the North Caucasus recently, including one last week in the Kabardino-Balkariya region. The killing of Anzor Astemirov was mourned by contributors to two al-Qaida-affiliated Web sites.

The killings have raised fears of retaliatory strikes by the militants. Emergency Minister Sergei Shoigu said the toll was 37 killed and 102 injured, but he did not give a breakdown of casualties at each station. In a televised meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev, Federal Security Service head Alexander Bortnikov said body fragments of the two bombers pointed to a Caucasus connection. He did not elaborate.

"We will continue the fight against terrorism unswervingly and to the end," Medvedev said.

Neither he nor Putin, who was on an official trip in Siberia, announced specific measures and it was not clear if Russia has new strategies to unleash in the Caucasus, where violent separatism has spread from Chechnya into neighboring republics.

Although the Russian army battered Chechen rebels in massive assaults a decade ago, the separatists continue to move through the region's mountains and forests with comparative ease and launch frequent small attacks.

New York's transit system beefed up security as a precaution following the Moscow bombings. A spokesman for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Kevin Ortiz, said the agency has a "heightened security presence," but declined further comment. The agency is in charge of New York City buses and subways, as well as suburban trains, and bridges and tunnels.

The Moscow blasts practically paralyzed movement in the city center as emergency vehicles sped to the stations.

In the Park Kultury blast, the bomber was wearing a belt packed with plastic explosive and set it off as the train's doors opened, said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia's top investigative body. The woman has not been identified, he told reporters.

A woman who sells newspapers outside the Lubyanka station, Ludmila Famokatova, said there appeared to be no panic, but that many of the people who streamed out were distraught.

"One man was weeping, crossing himself, saying 'thank God I survived'," she said.

Rounding up the usual suspects?
Russia: Bomb caused train crash that killed 26
YAHOO
By IVAN SEKRETAREV and DAVID NOWAK, Associated Press Writer
November 28, 2009

UGLOVKA, Russia – Russian officials opened a terrorism investigation Saturday, saying that a homemade bomb planted on the tracks of the high-speed Moscow-to-St. Petersburg route caused a derailment that killed at least 26 people and injured dozens more. The head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Alexander Borotnikov, was quoted by the Interfax and RIA Novosti news as saying that an improvised explosive device equivalent to 15 pounds (7 kilograms) of TNT had detonated when the train passed over it Friday night about 9:30 p.m. Remains of the device were found at the site of the crash, Borotnikov said.

"Indeed, this was a terrorist attack," Interfax cited Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for federal prosecutors, as saying. He told the ITAR-Tass news agency that the bomb crater on the track was 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep.

The derailment of the upscale train, which was popular with government officials and business executives, would be Russia's deadliest terrorist strike outside the volatile North Caucasus region in years. Witness accounts appeared to back up reports of a bomb blast.

"It was immensely scary. I think it was an act of terrorism because there was a bang," passenger Vitaly Rafikov told Channel One state television. He said he helped with the rescue, hauling victims from the wreckage and lighting fires for warmth. Passenger Igor Pechnikov was in the second of the three derailed cars.

"A trembling began, and the carriage jolted violently to the left. I flew through half of the carriage," he said.

Terrorism has been a major concern in Russia since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, as Chechen rebels have clashed with government forces in two wars and Islamist separatists continue to target law enforcement officials. But there was no word from officials on Saturday on any suspects or their motives and no group claimed responsibility for the blast. President Dmitry Medvedev called for calm.

"We need there to be no chaos, because the situation is tense as it is," he said.

The last three carriages of the 14-car Nevsky Express careered off the tracks Friday night as the train approached speeds of 200 kilometers per hour (130 mph), officials said. More than 600 passengers were on the train when it derailed near the border of the Novgorod and Tver provinces. The rural area is 250 miles (402 kilometers) northwest of Moscow and 150 miles (250 kilometers) southeast of St. Petersburg.

Reports on the death toll varied.

Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said at least 26 people were killed, 18 were missing and nearly 100 were injured and hospitalized in the derailment. The Prosecutor General's office said the death toll had risen to 30, with 60 others in the hospital. The injured were transported to hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg by bus, train and even helicopters, but some said the evacuation was agonizingly slow.

Yekaterina Ivanova, a wounded passenger, told the NTV television network that workers took at least four hours to get her out of the train.

"In the hospital, the doctors are better, the medical teams are working in harmony," she said. "The young people from the Ministry of Emergency Situations carried us out on stretchers, but other people in uniform were just standing there and staring, and no one was even helping to carry out the wounded."

Police and prosecutors swarmed over the disaster site Saturday and restricted access to the bomb crater. Rescue workers scoured the wreckage, searching for the missing, as two huge cranes lifted up pieces of twisted metal. A battered railway carriage lay on its side across the tracks, while baggage and metal debris were scattered in the mud. Emergency workers wrapped up in blankets and huddled around fires as a light rain started to fall.

Their efforts were hampered later Saturday when a small explosion was heard, forcing Russia's security services to close rail links between the two main cities that had been partially reopened, Interfax reported. There was no elaboration.

Military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer told APTN that Islamist separatists who operate in the North Caucasus and nationalist groups would naturally fall under suspicion.

One prominent nationalist group, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, issued a denial of responsibility Saturday. Nationalists were blamed in a similar blast that caused a derailment along the same line in 2007, injuring 27 passengers. Authorities arrested two suspects in the 2007 blast and are searching for a third — a former military officer.

Across Russia's North Caucasus region, attacks are relatively frequent. In August, a suicide bombing of a police station in Ingushetia's capital killed 25 people and injured 164. A September 2004 attack on a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan ignited a three-day hostage-taking ordeal in which more than 330 hostages were killed in a botched rescue. In addition, a December 2003 suicide bombing of a train near Chechnya killed 44 people.

But outside the volatile southern region, the last fatal terrorist attacks occurred in August 2004. A suicide car bombing in Moscow that month killed 10 people only days after bombs ripped through two passenger aircraft, killing more than 80 people. Those attacks were blamed on Chechen rebels, as was a February 2004 Moscow subway bombing that killed 40 people.

A 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theater ended with the deaths of around 130 people.

Another train derailment in June 2005 left at least 12 injured on a train that had been traveling from Chechnya to Moscow.

Evidence of Bombing in Russian Train Derailment
NYTIMES
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and ELLEN BARRY
November 29, 2009

MOSCOW – A luxury express train carrying hundreds of passengers from Moscow to St. Petersburg derailed on Friday night after a bomb detonated on the tracks in a rural area, killing more than 25 people and injuring more than 100 others, officials said.

The force of the crash crumpled parts of the train, propelling several of its 14 cars well off the rails, trapping passengers in smashed compartments and scattering luggage into the nearby woods. People on the train, called the Nevsky Express, perhaps the most illustrious in Russia, reported a scene of panic and devastation.

The investigative wing of the prosecutor general’s office said on Saturday that it had discovered remnants of a bomb at the site that left a crater five feet deep.

Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railway system, said, “The basic version that it is being investigated by the lead investigators is that it was an unknown device, by unknown persons. Simply put, a terrorist act.”

There were no immediate credible claims of responsibility.

The explosion was the worst terrorist attack in Russia in years, outside the volatile North Caucasus region.

In nationally televised remarks, President Dmitri A. Medvedev called for calm. “We need there to be no chaos, because the situation is tense as it is,” he said.

At the crash site, an isolated region that is 200 miles northwest of Moscow, victims spoke of disarray, with rescuers delayed in arriving and then lacking equipment to extract people from the smashed railway cars, according to interviews on Russian television. It was several hours before proper equipment arrived.

“I was riding in one of the cars that derailed,” Igor Pechnikov, a passenger, told the Channel One network. “There was a jolt and the car started sliding sharply to the left. I was thrown from my seat and flew halfway down the car.”

Another passenger, Tatyana Yeryomina, said, “Three of us went into the corridor to chat, when suddenly the lights went out and we fell to the floor. We were able to group together, which saved us. There was a huge hole in our car and we realized that something catastrophic had happened.”

At a nearby hospital, Marina Gravit said her train car seemed to buckle.

“All of a sudden the walls started to contract and expand and everything happened very slowly,” Ms. Gravit said. “Then there was a grinding sound. We fell to the floor and everything became dark.”

The train was carrying 633 passengers and 20 railway personnel during its regular run to St. Petersburg, officials said

Trains in Russia have been the targets of sabotage and bombs before. In 2007, an explosion on the Moscow-St. Petersburg line derailed a train, injuring more than two dozen people. Two people were arrested, but the motive was unclear.

Earlier in the decade, Muslim separatists from Chechnya in the North Caucasus region made passenger trains and subways a target. A 2003 suicide bomb attack on a commuter train near Chechnya killed 44. At least 12 people were injured in 2005 when a bomb derailed a train headed from Chechnya to Moscow.

But Russia’s Soviet-era infrastructure, which has often not been well-maintained, has also caused deadly catastrophes. In addition, negligence and misconduct, sometimes caused by alcohol, have also been a factor in accidents.

Yekaterina Ivanova, one of the wounded passengers, told the NTV television network that the evacuation was frustratingly slow.

“In the hospital, the doctors are better, the medical teams are working in harmony,” she said. “The young people from the Ministry of Emergency Situations carried us out on stretchers, but other people in uniform were just standing there and staring, and no one was even helping to carry out the wounded.”

Ms. Ivanova said rescue personnel did not manage to extract her from the train until 1:30 a.m., nearly four hours after the accident.

Medical staff reported that reaching the scene was complicated because it was far from major highways.

Nadezhda Milyukova, the lead emergency physician, told NTV that, “there are only country roads, with huge ditches and puddles. You need all-terrain vehicles for those roads. Our Fiats did not do well on them.”

Victims’ relatives told NTV that government hotlines did not function well, and when they got through, there was little information.

“When we asked for some contact phone numbers, the lady told us that it didn’t fall within her job description,” a relative told the television station.

Hundreds of passengers who survived the crash were moved onto a high-speed train and transported to St. Petersburg, pulling into the station around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Several were still in shock, and nearly all refused to speak about what had happened, NTV reported.

When the train arrived in St. Petersburg, police surrounded the platform and ambulances pulled up to the train cars. Oleg Salov, first deputy director of the Ministry of Emergency Situations in St. Petersburg, said psychologists were meeting with relatives of the dead and injured.

One of the train’s café cars was turned into an emergency center for first aid and psychological assistance, and many of the passengers went there instead of returning home. A long line of train passengers sought to return their tickets for cash because they were afraid to travel.

20 Die in Suicide Bombing in Russia
NYTIMES
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
August 18, 2009

MOSCOW — At least 20 people were killed, and dozens were wounded in a suicide truck bombing at a police headquarters in Russia’s tumultuous North Caucasus region on Monday, according to government officials, the latest episode in a spate of violence to hit the area in recent weeks.

The blast hit the police headquarters in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, around 9 a.m. local time as many police officials were arriving at work.

The attack seemed to further undermine the authority of Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, Ingushetia’s populist president who came to power last October vowing a softer approach in dealing with rebel violence than Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of neighboring Chechnya.

It was the bloodiest single attack to hit Ingushetia in some time, though violence against police and government officials in this and other North Caucasus republics occurs almost daily. Mr. Yevkurov himself announced last week that he would soon return to work after he was seriously wounded in a suicide attack on his convoy in June. Ingushetia’s construction minister, Ruslan Amirkhanov, was assassinated in his office last week.

Russian television coverage of Monday’s attack showed rescue workers picking through a large swath of smoldering rubble.

“It was a suicide bomber,” said Kaloi Akhilgov, the spokesman for Mr. Yevkurov. “He rammed the gate of the police headquarters, drove into the courtyard and blew himself up.”

The blast occurred in a heavily populated area, not far from several banks and government buildings. A six-storey residential building nearby was also heavily damaged. Some 60 people were injured, the prosecutor general’s office said. Mr. Akhilgov said 10 of the injured were children.

A spokeswoman for the central hospital in Nazran said dozens of victims had arrived with severe burns and broken bones. The investigative wing of the prosecutor general’s office put the death toll at 20 and said it was expected to rise.

In response to the bombing, President Dmitri A. Medvedev ordered Russia’s interior minister to increase the number of police forces in Ingushetia.

That appears to be a step back from the more peaceful strategy for dealing with Ingushetia’s militant threat Mr. Yevkurov originally advocated upon becoming president. A former intelligence officer and a devout Muslim, Mr. Yevkurov reached out to opposition leaders as well as militant commanders in an attempt to ease the bubbling tensions in Ingushetia.

But the violence has continued, fueled in part by the arrival of militants fleeing Mr. Kadyrov’s brutal counterinsurgency in Chechnya, where a decade and a half of internecine warfare has ground down the rebel movement to a paltry, though potent, few.

The bombing on Monday comes just days after separate attacks in neighboring Chechnya and Dagestan, killed over 20 people, including seven female employees of a sauna in Dagestan.

In a sign that Mr. Yevkurov’s experiment in reconciliation has failed, Mr. Kadyrov has sent Chechen commanders to Ingushetia to conduct counterterrorism operations there.

“We have a common enemy and a common task to eliminate it,” Mr. Kadyrov said in a statement on his Web site on Monday. “Together with President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, we will realize this mission and do everything necessary to liquidate the remaining militants. The leadership of this country supports us.”

Mideast in Flux: Israel’s Foreign Minister Cozies Up to Moscow
NYTIMES
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
June 14, 2009

MOSCOW — “Would you mind speaking without an interpreter?” Vladimir V. Putin asked, and his visitor, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new foreign minister, responded that he could not imagine doing business any other way. The two then chatted in Russian, as if their meeting this month were a homecoming for a local boy who made good.

In some sense, it was. Mr. Lieberman is an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, and the notably warm reception that he received in Russia could be a sign of things ahead. His hard-line positions have disquieted the Obama administration, but in Moscow, there was no such squeamishness.

There was no way to tell, of course, how much of the cordiality was simply a display for the cameras. Still, it pulled back the curtain a bit on how Israel and Russia are trying to navigate the crosscurrents of a Middle East profoundly in flux — notably in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and in Iran, where the tumultuous election on Friday was perhaps the most vivid illustration.

Israel’s new government has voiced its reservations about the United States’ new policies under President Obama in both of those areas, so Mr. Lieberman’s trip could easily be seen as a tactic — using his access in Russia to suggest that Israel might become less dependent on the United States and look to Moscow for support.

Even if it is just a bluff, his pivot toward Russia — which itself seeks a larger diplomatic role in the Middle East — adds one more element to a list of shifts under way in the region. All of these changes are traceable, to some extent, to reactions to Mr. Obama’s emphasis on improving relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds through diplomacy, and pressing Israel to stop the growth of settlements in the West Bank.

Last week was a case in point: It started with an American-aligned coalition winning an unexpected victory in parliamentary elections in Lebanon, and it ended with the fiercely fought Iranian election, in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an anti-American populist, faced surprisingly spirited competition from Mir Hussein Moussavi, a relative moderate who favors fewer strictures on personal freedom in Iran.

This week, Mr. Lieberman is to visit Washington for talks with American officials, but Mr. Obama is not scheduled to see him. In Russia, by contrast, Mr. Lieberman had a parade of meetings with Prime Minister Putin, President Dmitri A. Medvedev and others. And Mr. Lieberman went to Russia before Washington.

“We would like to add some diversity in our foreign policy,” Mr. Lieberman told a Russian-language television station in Israel upon his return. “And, of course, Russia is a key player.”

Mr. Lieberman stressed that he did not favor weakening Israel’s fundamental bond with the United States. And whatever his strategy, ultimately it is Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has the final say on foreign policy (and who has met in Washington with Mr. Obama).

In fact, the maneuvering in recent weeks has at times had the feel of shadowboxing. With a new diplomacy-oriented administration in Washington and a new hawkish one in Jerusalem, the various parties in the region are trying to prod and test one another to see how positions are being recast.

The Kremlin is hoping to use this period to reassert itself in the Middle East and challenge American dominance there. If it has good relations with both Israelis and Arabs, it can more readily present itself as an honest broker. It is also planning to sponsor a Middle East peace conference in Moscow.

Mr. Lieberman seemed to thrive here because he speaks not only the language of Russia, but also that of the Russian leadership. Both sides believe in a tough use of state power, according to political analysts, as well as a resolute nationalism and a willingness to act against Islamic extremism in ways that may be perceived in the West as excessive.

For example, Mr. Lieberman, who reflects the right-wing views of many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, has called for Arab citizens in Israel to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. The Kremlin recently established a panel to combat what it termed attempts to falsify history in ways that demean the achievements of Russia.

Tatyana A. Karasova, head of the Israel department at the Institute for Oriental Studies in Moscow, said Mr. Putin and Mr. Lieberman had a rapport because they are both “gosudarstvenniks” — a term that derives from the Russian word for state or government and implies a person who likes wielding official power. “Putin, as a gosudarstvennik, can really understand another gosudarstvennik like Lieberman,” she said.

While the Soviet Union was among the first nations to recognize Israel at its founding in 1948, it later became a staunch cold war ally of Arab countries like Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Soviet Jews encountered pervasive discrimination, which is one reason so many left.

Since the Soviet collapse, Russia’s relations with Israel have steadily improved; the one million immigrants who fled the former Soviet Union for Israel became one reason. Many maintain a cultural bond to Russia. (Mr. Lieberman himself emigrated from Moldova in the late 1970s.)

Russia and Israel have eliminated visa restrictions for travel between their countries, and Russian tourists now flood Israel, with Israeli executives often going the other way. Anti-Semitism in Russia still exists, but is much less widespread. Because of the immigration, Russia arguably has closer societal ties to Israel than the United States does.

(On his Russia visit, Mr. Lieberman even boasted that the immigrants so revere Russian culture that celebrations for the birthday of Pushkin would be more elaborate in Israel than in Russia itself.)

At the same time, Russia retains strong diplomatic and business interests in Arab countries and Iran that it does not want to damage. It talks to Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and to the fundamentalist Hezbollah in Lebanon, despite Israeli objections.

Russia is also building a civilian nuclear power plant in Iran, and is less willing than Washington to use sanctions to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. This is a point of friction with Israel, and at least for now, it did not seem that Mr. Lieberman had much success in convincing the Kremlin to move more aggressively against Iran.

Even so, it appears that he believes that he has a better chance than other Israeli officials in wooing Moscow. And Mr. Putin indicated that Mr. Lieberman may be right.

“It is gratifying to realize that people who know more than hearsay about this country are appointed to such high posts in Israel,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Lieberman. “I hope that it will be an additional impetus for the development of Russian-Israeli relations.”

Analysts pointed to another aspect of this budding relationship: both the Kremlin and rightist Israelis nurture grievances about how they are seen in the United States and Europe.

“Both sides feel marginalized and pushed into a corner,” said Dmitri Babich, a political commentator with the state-run news agency in Moscow.

“If we look at all the criticism from the West about the Chechnya problem, it is very similar to what you hear people say in accusing the Israeli government,” he said. “Even the terms are the same — disproportionate use of force, too much collateral damage, etc. They feel that the West doesn’t realize how complex these problems are.”

Mr. Lieberman himself alluded to that confluence.

“Russia, more than anyone, is very familiar with terror,” he said. “Russia itself has suffered from double standards.”

Chechen warlord claims theatre attack; Basayev lost a leg when he stepped on a Russian mine
Friday, 1 November, 2002, 22:11 GMT

Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev has taken responsibility for the mass hostage-taking at a Moscow theatre 10 days ago and promised new attacks.

He also tendered his resignation from the rebel leadership and asked rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov for his forgiveness for not informing him of the operation. Russia accuses Mr Maskhadov of orchestrating the attack himself and is demanding the extradition of one of his envoys, Akhmed
Zakayev, from Denmark where he was arrested at Moscow's request after a conference on Chechnya on Wednesday.

But Danish Justice Minister Lene Espersen announced on Friday that he had yet to receive enough evidence to warrant Mr Zakayev's extradition.

Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Moscow had provided Danish authorities with documents proving Mr Zakayev is a terrorist, which were sufficient to justify Mr Zakayev's extradition.

Moscow issued the extradition request after a Chechen suicide squad seized a packed Moscow theatre and took about 800 people hostage, threatening to kill them if Russia did not withdraw its forces from Chechnya immediately. About 115 hostages and 50 Chechen rebels died when Russian special forces stormed the building on the third day of the siege.

Distancing

In a statement carried by the main Chechen rebel website Kavkaz-Tsentr, Mr Basayev defended the hostage-taking for giving "all Russians a first-hand insight into all the charms of the war unleashed by Russia and take it back to where it originated from".

The veteran warlord, who made his mark by personally leading a hostage-taking raid on the Russian town of Budyonnovsk in 1995 in which over 100 civilians died, said that in future Chechen rebels would "not make any demands and not take hostages".

Their "main goal will be destroying the enemy and exacting maximum damage", he said in his statement, which was couched in Islamic terms.

He asked Mr Maskhadov, the Chechen separatist leader ousted by Russian troops in 1999, to relieve him of all his posts except for command of the "Riyadus-Salikhin reconnaissance and sabotage battalion of shahids [martyrs]".

The Kremlin's spokesman on Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, dismissed the statement, saying that Mr Basayev was "trying to shield Maskhadov from blame, to save him for further political games".

Mr Maskhadov has denied any involvement in the Moscow hostage raid and denounced attacks on civilians. The BBC's Russian affairs analyst,
Stephen Dalziel, says the Russian authorities clearly need to hold someone responsible for what happened at the theatre and have so far gone for Mr Maskhadov and his envoy in Denmark.

And, he says, Moscow may also have incriminating evidence against Mr Maskhadov which, for security reasons, it has not divulged.

Our analyst says that Mr Basayev and Mr Maskhadov have not always had good relations and the warlord would not necessarily be expected to cover up for the official rebel leader.

New media law

The lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, has approved a law which will severely restrict the media's reporting of anti-terrorist operations.

The law was under discussion before last week's hostage crisis, but its passage was accelerated by the siege. The Duma passed the new law by 231 for votes to 106 against.

Deputies agreed that the hostage-takers in the theatre were well prepared for media coverage. They allowed hostages to use their mobile
phones - thus gaining extra publicity - and invited two television crews into the building. If and when the bill becomes law, there will be a ban on the publication or broadcast of any statement that hinders an operation to break such a siege, or attempts to justify the aims of the hostage-takers.

Outspoken Putin critic shot dead in Moscow
By James Kilner
October 7, 2006

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of President
Vladimir Putin, was shot dead on Saturday at her apartment block in central Moscow, police said.

"According to initial information she was killed by two shots when leaving the lift. Neighbors found her body," a police source told Reuters. Police found a pistol and four rounds in the lift.

Politkovskaya, a 48-year-old mother of two, won international fame and numerous prizes for her dogged pursuit of rights abuses by Putin's government, particularly in the violent southern province of Chechnya.

"The first thing that comes to mind is that Anna was killed for her professional activities. We don't see any other motive for this terrible crime," said Vitaly Yaroshevsky, a deputy editor of the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked.

Moscow chief prosecutor Yuri Syomin told reporters at the crime scene, a nine-storey Soviet-era apartment building in central Moscow, that he was treating the death as murder.

Paramedics took Politkovskaya's body, wrapped in a white sheet, out of the building and put it into an ambulance. A middle-aged women laid flowers at the doors of the building and stood with her head against the wall, crying.

Politkovskaya's silver Lada, filled with supermarket shopping bags, was parked outside the apartment block.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, a shareholder in Politkovskaya's newspaper Novaya Gazeta, called the killing a "savage crime."

"It is a blow to the entire democratic, independent press," Gorbachev told Interfax news agency. "It is a grave crime against the country, against all of us."

In the days before her death, Politkovskaya had been working on a story about torture in Chechnya, which was expected to be published on Monday, her newspaper said.

DISTRUSTED PUTIN

The rebel province has been a constant headache for the Kremlin. Russia sent troops in 1994 to crush an insurgency but after 12 years of bloodshed and the devastation of the province's capital Grozny, sporadic attacks continue.

Politkovskaya was a fierce critic of Putin, who she accused of stifling freedom and failing to shake off his past as a KGB agent.

"I dislike him for ... his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies ... for the massacre of the innocents which went on throughout his first term as president," she wrote in her book "Putin's Russia" which was published overseas but not in Russia.

Her death came on the day Putin turned 54.

In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists described Politkovskaya's murder as a "devastating development for journalism in Russia."

Born to Soviet Ukrainian diplomats in New York in 1958, Politkovskaya studied journalism at Moscow's State University and began her career in state media.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union she began working at the independent media which began to flourish under Gorbachev.

Politkovskaya's war reporting often meant she was under scrutiny by Russian politicians and, sometimes, the security services. She had been arrested and held in a pit for three days in Chechnya and received numerous death threats.

She said she was unable to cover the bloody siege of a school at Beslan in 2004 -- in which more than 330 children and parents died when troops stormed the school -- because she was poisoned on the flight from Moscow and ended up in hospital.

Her murder is the most high-profile killing of a journalist here since the death of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in 2004.

Contract killings are not unusual in Moscow where gang violence reigned after the fall of communism in 1991.

Last month, gunmen shot and killed senior Russian central banker Andrei Kozlov in one of the most high profile contract killings since Putin came to power in 2000.

(Additional reporting by Robin Paxton, Tatyana Ustinova in Moscow and Bill Trott in Washington)