RUSSIA: Russian officials blamed a woman suicide bomber for an explosion that killed at least 10 people and injured 51 others in northern Moscow last night, writes Daniel McLaughlin
It ripped through a busy car park between the Rizhskaya metro station and a shopping centre, just hours after investigators said they suspected two Chechen women of blowing up two airliners over southern Russia last Tuesday, killing all 90 people on board.
Russian television showed bodies scattered around the car park, and dazed and injured victims staggering away from the twisted, blazing wreckage of a Lada car.
"It was an act of terrorism, committed by a female suicide bomber with a large amount of explosive and various metal bolts and other objects . . . in order to do maximum damage," said Moscow's mayor, Mr Yuri Luzhkov, from the scene of the blast.
"She was heading into the metro station, but saw two policemen there and so turned round and decided to blow herself up outside," Mr Luzhkov said, insisting that many more people would have died had the alleged bomber made it into the metro, where commuters were still returning home from work at about 8.15 p.m. Moscow time.
Other officials said investigators were studying whether the woman's explosive belt had been detonated remotely by an accomplice watching her from a distance, or if the bomb had actually been planted underneath the mangled Lada.
"There was a powerful blast and then a smaller one. I thought my roof would come off," said Mr Sergei Pyslaru, who was driving on a nearby street.
"It was like a big thunder clap," said another witness, Mr Alexei Borodin. "There was one explosion, then another small one, probably from gas." I saw five people who could not stand up.
"And there were other people who were in small bits. There was one man without a stomach shouting: 'Where are the police?'"
Russian media immediately linked the blast to the plane crashes, which shocked the nation a week earlier, almost exactly to the hour. Security service sources have said they believe the two Chechens suspected of blowing up the airliners arrived in Moscow with two other women, whose whereabouts were unknown.
Russians have come to fear female suicide bombers whom the media have dubbed "black widows", and who are said to be vengeful relatives of Chechen men killed by Moscow's troops during two brutal wars in the southern republic since 1994.
In July last year two women suicide bombers, thought to be Chechens, killed 15 other people when they blew themselves up at an open-air rock festival at a Moscow airfield. Six months later another female bomber killed five people close to the Kremlin.
An Islamist group, calling itself the Islambouli Brigades, last night claimed responsibility for yesterday's bomb attack, which it said came in support of Muslims in Chechnya.The same group also claimed responsibility for last week's plane attacks.