MUSLIM HATE FOR RUSSIA!
Dozens Dead After Suicide Bomb Rips Moscow Airport
Voice of America
24 January 2011
An explosion ripped
through the international section of Moscow's busiest airport, killing 35 people
and wounding 168, officials said.
The massive blast, with an explosive force of seven kilograms of TNT, was caused
by a suicide bomber, Russian officials said.
Sergei Lavochkin, was waiting in the arrivals hall for a friend to arrive from
Cuba, when he heard the explosion.
He said he heard a massive bang, saw panels fall from the ceiling, then heard
people screaming, and saw people running away.
British Airways passenger Mark Green had just arrived at the airport. He told
BBC television that after the explosion he saw people streaming out of the
terminal, some covered in blood. A British citizen and several other foreigners
were among the dead, Russian news agencies reported
The LifeNews.ru website said many victims had metal fragments embedded in
their bodies and that the explosive device was packed with bolts, nuts, nails
and ball bearings.
The bomb appeared to have exploded in an area where people gather to meet
travelers emerging from customs. The airport Domodedovo handles almost half the
air traffic for Moscow. Served by 48 foreign airlines, it has flights to 243
cities around the world.
President Dmitry Medvedev, looking somber and downcast, told officials in a
nationally televised briefing that it was a terrorist attack.
He ordered authorities to immediately tighten security at Moscow's two other
commercial airports and other key transport facilities, including the subway
system.
During the past 14 months, terrorists have targeted Moscow's transportation
system with three bombings that have killed more than 100 people. In November
2009, a bomb derailed a high-speed, luxury train to St. Petersburg, killing 28.
Last March, two suicide bombers from Dagestan set off bombs in two Moscow subway
trains, killing 40. In both these attacks, Islamic radicals took
responsibility.
In today’s airport attack, Russian news wires report police are searching for
three suspects from the North Caucasus. Investigative Committee spokesman
Vladimir Markin says experts are trying to identify the suspected bomber.
Interfax reported police found the head of an Arab-looking man, aged between 30
to 35.
Leaders of the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus have vowed to bring the
violence to the nation’s capital. In Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia, there
are almost daily, armed attacks on government and police officials.
Domodedovo is generally regarded as Moscow's most modern airport, but its
security procedures have failed in the past.
In 2004, two suicide bombers were able to board planes at Domodedovo by buying
tickets illegally from airport personnel. The bombers blew themselves up in
mid-air, killing 90 people aboard the two flights.
The blast represents a big setback for confidence in Russia’s security as it
gears up for two major international sporting events, the Winter Olympics in
2014 and the 2018 World Cup.
As President Medvedev postponed his visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos,
international sympathy poured into Moscow.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said U.S. President Barack Obama called the
bombing "an outrageous act of terrorism against the Russian people,"
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Twitter he was "deeply
disturbed" by the bombing and that "NATO and Russia stand together in the fight
against terrorism."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel slammed the attack as"cowardly"
Militants hit Russia power plant, killing two guards
21 July 2010 Last updated
BBC News
Emergency workers inside the power station assess the damage
Armed militants have stormed a hydroelectric power station in Russia's volatile North Caucasus region, killing two guards and detonating four bombs.
TV footage showed fires raging at the plant, in the mainly Muslim republic of Kabardino-Balkaria republic.
Officials said the fires were now under control, and that electricity supplies had not been affected.
Analysts say it appears to be an escalation of Islamist insurgent attacks on Russian economic targets.
"This shows the scourge of terrorism is not only not subsiding, but expanding geographically," said Gennady Gudkov, deputy head of the security committee of Russia's parliament, according to the Reuters news agency.
President Dmitry Medvedev said that security had been stepped up.
"Spoke to head of FSB [security service] and president of Kabardino-Balkaria. Security at strategic sites tightened after today's explosions," he said in a message on the social-networking website Twitter, which limits messages to 140 characters.
Kabardino-Balkaria has seen less militant violence than the other semi-autonomous republics in the region: Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia.
The most serious attack in Kabardino-Balkaria came in October 2005 when dozens of men stormed the regional capital Nalchik. The Russian government said 136 people were killed, including 91 militants.
'No disaster threat'
State-owned firm RusHydro, which runs the power station, said in a statement on its website that explosions had hit the plant at 0525 local time (0125 GMT) on Wednesday.
The attackers detonated four explosive devices in the 25-megawatt plant on the Baksan river, but a fifth failed to go off.
Investigators said two explosions shook the plant's turbine room and another two hit the transformer vault.
According to police spokesman Adlan Kakakuyev, two cars carrying half a dozen assailants had attacked the plant, shooting two guards and wounding three other people.
The attackers reportedly seized two Kalashnikov assault rifles from the dead guards.
The same group are believed to have earlier opened fire on a police station in the town of Baksan.
Officials said the flow of water from the dam, on the Baksan river, had been stopped to prevent any flooding downriver.
Electricity supplies had not been disrupted because power had been rerouted from elsewhere, the authorities said.
Regional officials said there was no further danger of a "technical accident or disaster" at the plant, which was built in the 1930s.
According to Russia's Ria-Novosti news agency, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has put Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin in charge of repairing the damaged power station.
Moscow subway attacks fuel fears of widening Muslim insurgency
March 30, 2010
MOSCOW (AP) Brazen suicide bombings in Moscow on Monday confronted Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with a grave challenge to his record of curbing terrorism, and raised the possibility that he will respond as he has in the past by significantly tightening control over the government.
The explosions, set off by women in two landmark subway stations, killed at least 38 people and wounded scores of others. Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, the bombings sparked fears that the Muslim insurgency in southern Russia, including Chechnya, was once again being brought to the country's heart.
They also revived a peculiar fear in the Russian capital, one that goes beyond the usual terrorism worries of a metropolis: the specter of female bombers, the Black Widows.
Investigators say the remains of the two bombers pointed to a Caucasus connection. They added that they are looking for two women seen on surveillance camera footage accompanying the attackers to the doors of a Metro station in southwest Moscow.
Earlier this decade, Moscow's fear of such attackers was so strong it became a lurid obsession. Women, sometimes casually clad in jeans and blending in to the swirl of the city, committed at least 16 bombings, including two on planes. Such suicide bombings were associated with women from Chechnya, and the attackers came to be called the Black Widows.
World leaders, including President Barack Obama, condemned Monday's attacks. Obama telephoned Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to convey condolences from the U.S.
The attacks during the morning rush hour seemed all but designed to taunt Russia's security services, which have been championed by Putin in the decade since he took power. The first one occurred at the Lubyanka Station, next to the headquarters of the FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB that Putin led in the late 1990s.
Putin, the former president and current prime minister, has built his reputation in part on his success in bottling up the Muslim insurgency in southern Russia and preventing major terrorist attacks in the country's population centers in recent years.
The attacks could throw into doubt the policies of Putin's protege, Medvedev, who has spoken in favor of liberalizing the government, increasing political pluralism and dealing with terrorism by addressing the root causes of the insurgency.
While Medvedev has not yet made major changes, Putin has generally allowed him to pursue his course. More terrorism, though, could cause Putin to shove Medvedev aside and move the security-oriented circle of advisers around Putin to the forefront.
"Putin said, 'One thing that I definitely accomplished was this,' and he didn't," said Pavel K. Baev, a Russian who is a professor at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo.
"My feeling is this is not an isolated attack, that we will see more," Baev said. "If we are facing a situation where there is a chain of attacks, that would undercut every attempt to soften, liberalize, open up, and increase the demand for tougher measures."
Putin on Monday limited his comments largely to vows to destroy the terrorists who organized the attacks.
But when he last faced a spate of such violence in 2004, he reacted with a sweeping reorganization of the government that he said would unite the country against terrorism but also concentrated power in the Kremlin.
The subway system in Moscow is one of the world's most extensive and well-managed, and the bombings Monday spread anxiety that is unlikely to dissipate for some time. For many people here, the day's events recalled the tense times in the early part of the last decade when the city, including the subway, was hit with several terrorist attacks.
It was during that period when the Black Widows made their reputation.
Suicide bombing was a tactic that came late to Chechnya and was nearly unknown during the first war from 1994 to 1996. But once it arrived, in 2000, in an attack that killed 27 Russian special forces soldiers, it quickly became associated with women.
Women adorned in billowy black robes and strapped with explosives made up 19 of the 41 captors in the October 2002 hostage-taking in the Moscow theater, which left 130 people dead in the city's deadliest terrorist incident.
It ended when Russian special services released a sleep-inducing gas into the building. When soldiers entered the auditorium they reportedly, as a first precaution, shot dead the Black Widows where they lay, lest they wake up and explode.
Alexander Ignatenko, head of the independent Moscow-based Institute for Religion and Politics, said Islamic militants in the Caucasus often recruit women whose relatives were killed by Russian security services.
"They tell them that if they become martyrs, they will join their husbands, brothers and fathers," he said. "And they also persuade them that the Russians as a nation share a collective guilt."
While the Muslim insurgency has not subsided in recent years, major attacks outside the Caucasus region had been unusual, and in April 2009, the Kremlin even announced what it described as the end of special counterterrorism operations in Chechnya.
But in November, terrorists bombed a luxury passenger train that was traveling in a rural area from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing 26 people. Last month, 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, somewhere far off in 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.
Umarov has relied on al-Qaeda's financial support and has several al-Qaeda emissaries in his entourage, Ignatenko said.
"Al-Qaeda has established a presence in the North Caucasus, like they did in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Europe," Ignatenko told The Associated Press.
Published: 5/26/2006
PARIS - A timeline of the conflict in Chechnya and inter-linked violence:
1994: Russia sends troops into the predominantly Muslim republic, where the local leadership has declared independence.
1996: After fighting which kills an estimated 50,000 people and leaves Chechnya's cities in ruins, Russia reaches an agreement with the rebels and pulls its troops out, leaving the province with de facto independence.
1999: Chechen separatists launch a series of bloody attacks in the neighbouring province of Dagestan. Some 300 people die in bombings in Moscow and other cities that the authorities blame on Chechen separatists. Independent analysts suspect that security forces may have had a hand in at least some of the bombings.
The government of Vladimir Putin -- prime minister at the time -- launches an assault on Chechnya by air and land forces. The most intense fighting ends in March 2000.
2001: Human Rights Watch estimates the number of displaced persons in Chechnya and neighbouring Ingushetia to be 430,000.
2002: Amid continuing violence in the republic, rebels take hundreds of people hostage in a Moscow theatre. When security forces use gas to storm the building, 130 civilians and 41 Chechen guerrillas are killed.
2003-4: The violence brings an increasing number of suicide bombings, both inside Chechnya and in other parts of Russia.
In September 2004, armed Chechen separatists take some 1,200 children, teachers and parents hostage at a school in Beslan, in the Caucasian republic of North Ossetia. When security forces storm the building two days later 331 civilians and 31 rebels are killed. More than half the dead are children.
Russian forces in Chechnya continue to come under almost daily attack to the present time.
There are no reliable figures for the numbers killed in the fighting. According to official figures, Russia has lost some 10,000 troops in all. Human rights experts estimate the number of civilians killed to be as high as 100,000. Several thousand people have disappeared without trace.