Suicide bomber targets Volgograd train station
MOSCOW — A day after a bomb exploded at a railway station in Russia’s Volgograd, another blast ripped through a trolleybus in the city Monday morning, killing 10 people, a Russian media report said.
On Sunday, a suicide bomber struck a busy railway station in the southern Russian city, killing at least 15 people and wounding scores more, officials said, in a stark reminder of the threat Russia is facing as it prepares to host February’s Olympics in Sochi.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bomb attacks in Volgograd, but it came several months after Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov called for new attacks against civilian targets in Russia, including the Sochi Games.
Suicide bombings have rocked Russia for years, but many have been contained to the North Caucasus, the centre of an insurgency seeking an Islamist state in the region. Until recently, Volgograd was not a typical target, but the city formerly known as Stalingrad has now been struck twice in two months — suggesting militants may be using the transportation hub as a way of showing their reach outside their region.
Volgograd, which lies close to volatile Caucasus provinces, is 900 kilometres south of Moscow and about 650 kilometres northeast of Sochi, a Black Sea resort flanked by the North Caucasus Mountains.
The bombing highlights the daunting security challenge Russia will face in fulfilling its pledge to make the Sochi Games the “safest Olympics in history.” The government has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers, police and other security personnel to protect the Games.
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird described the bombing as a “heinous crime” and called for those responsible to be identified and brought to justice.
“Canada strongly condemns today’s cowardly act of terrorism in Volgograd,” Baird said Sunday in a release. “We continue to engage Russian officials in discussions on the special security arrangements that will be in place at Olympic venues, airports, border crossings and other sensitive areas,” Baird added.
Through the day, officials issued conflicting statements on casualties. They also said that the suspected bomber was a woman, but later said it could have been a man.
The Interfax news agency quoted unidentified law enforcement agents as saying that footage taken by surveillance cameras indicated the bomber was a man. It also reported that it was further proven by a torn male finger ringed by a safety pin removed from a hand grenade found on the site of the explosion.
The bomber detonated explosives in front of a metal detector just be- yond the station’s main entrance when a police sergeant became suspicious and rushed forward to check ID, officials said. The officer was killed by the blast, and several other policemen were wounded.
“When the suicide bomber saw a policeman near a metal detector, she became nervous and set off her explosive device,” Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for the nation’s top investigative agency, said in a statement earlier in the day. He added that the bomb contained about 10 kilograms of TNT and was rigged with shrapnel.
He later told Interfax that the attacker could have been a man, but added that the investigation was still ongoing.
Markin argued that security controls prevented a far greater number of casualties at the station, which was packed with people at a time when several trains were delayed.
The Russian official confirmed 13 people and the bomber were killed on the spot, and two other people later died at a hospital. About 40 were hospitalized.
Earlier in the day, Lifenews.ru, a Russian news portal, posted what it claimed was an image of the severed head of the “female” attacker. It said the attacker appeared to have been a woman whose two successive rebel husbands had been killed by Russian security forces in the Caucasus.