CHECHNYA: Chechen suicide bombers killed at least 40 people and injured about 200 yesterday when their explosive-laden truck devastated a compound of government buildings.
Officials said two or three people, including one woman, were in the lorry when it slammed through a security post and sped towards the local headquarters of the Moscow-backed administration in the northern Chechen town of Znamenskoye.
Under heavy gunfire from guards, the truck exploded before its supposed target, and destroyed the building housing the local FSB security service.
The blast gutted several other government buildings and houses, buried some cars and showered others with shrapnel, and left a crater 15 metres wide and five metres deep.
Maj Gen Ruslan Avtayev, head of Chechnya's Emergencies Ministry, said several women and children were among those killed after the truck exploded with the force of more than a tonne of TNT.
He said 57 of the injured were in a serious condition and warned that the death toll could rise, as workers searched the ruins for victims.
Russian President Mr Vladimir Putin said the attack was intended to derail a peace process that rebels dismiss as a sham.
"All such actions are aimed at one thing - stopping the process of the settlement of the situation in Chechnya, the process of political settlement," Mr Putin told a meeting of senior ministers. "We cannot and will not permit anything of the kind."
Mr Sergei Fridinski, Russia's deputy prosecutor general, said the truck exploded at about 10 a.m. local time, and killed mostly civilians in their homes, offices or on their way to work.
Russian television showed cranes moving rubble and workers searching for signs of life in piles of smashed brick and twisted wood and metal.
Military helicopters and ambulances ferried the injured to hospital, but local officials said treatment was hampered by a severe lack of blood for transfusions.
The attack, in an area considered one of Chechnya's most stable, dealt a blow to Mr Putin as he prepares to deliver his state of the nation address this week.
Less then two months ago, Mr Putin welcomed a referendum on a new constitution for Chechnya as a critical step to establishing peace in a republic shattered by two wars with the Kremlin since 1994.
Moscow said the poll showed Chechens overwhelmingly wanted to remain part of the Russian Federation, and Mr Putin held out the possibility of broad autonomy for the region and an amnesty for many rebels.
But several Western observers casted doubt on the results of the vote, and rebels denounced it as a fraud and vowed to fight on for independence.
Last month, they killed 16 people in a minibus blast and eight others in a separate explosion on a bus in the middle of Grozny, the regional capital.
Federal troops perish daily in gun and bomb attacks, despite the Kremlin's claims to be simply "mopping up" a few remaining guerrilla leaders.
Russian security officials said yesterday's bombing was almost identical to a an attack last December that saw rebels ram a truck packed with explosives into the headquarters of Chechnya's pro-Moscow government in Grozny. Some 80 people died and 170 were injured in the attack.
Chechnya's Moscow-appointed leader, Mr Akhmad Kadyrov, blamed the region's fugitive leader Mr Aslan Maskhadov for yesterday's bombing, and said he wanted to know how the truck - apparently of military origin - passed through several police checkpoints.
Mr Maskhadov's representative, Mr Salambek Maigov, told Ekho Moskvy radio that the rebel leader had nothing to do with the blast.
Mr Maskhadov was elected Chechnya's president after the guerrillas, who are strongest in the mountainous south of the region, won a 1994-96 war with Moscow's forces. Mr Putin sent the army back into Chechnya after he came to power in 1999, on the back of a pledge to crush rebels and reassert Russian control over the region.
The Kremlin says the rebels are funded by international terror groups, including the al-Qaeda network, and include Arab fighters in their ranks. Most analysts here concur that the guerrillas, having started life as purely pro-independence groups, have attracted increasing attention from Islamic radicals, but the extent of their role in Chechnya is unclear.