View Full Version : Subway Blasts Kill Dozens in Moscow
And so it goes...:(
Richard
Subway Blasts Kill Dozens in Moscow
Clifford Levy, NYT, 29 Mar 2010
Female suicide bombers set off huge explosions during rush hour Monday morning in two subway stations in central Moscow, officials said, killing at least 35 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 the Lubyanka station, which is 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, known as the Metro, 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 in a blast at the Park Kultury station. Dozens were injured.
(cont'd)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/world/europe/30moscow.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Lubyanka was my stop. The old KGB building made the stop infamous, but it is an upscale part of the center of Moscow these days. It is an expensive shopping and office district as well as where Moscow City Government houses their youth entrepreneurial and sports clubs.
Those two stops both have a slightly more upscale base of people using the metro.
Hopefully the Russians will do what needs to be done....with vigor.
Hopefully the Russians will do what needs to be done....with vigor.
A long standing problem.
http://www.flashpoints.info/countries-conflicts/Chechnya-web/Chechnya_briefing.htm
Richard
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. A message to the security services or a message from the security services? <<LINK (http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-satter043002.asp)>>
A message to the security services or a message from the security services?
A fair point Sigaba, Putin's no Boy Scout. I found the below interesting, though hard to agree with since, it doesn't address Chechen views towards the West, and it seems a lot of the bad ones we face in Iraq and Afghanistan are Chechen?
Russia: Shared scourge, different causes
Russia's dirty war is not over after all. And, as so often, the innocent are the first to suffer
The Guardian, Tuesday 30 March 2010
The parallels are written in the blood of the innocent. On a day much like any other, suicide bombers descend into the underground system of a major European city in the midst of the morning rush hour. They board a crowded train, crammed with commuters. They detonate their explosives. The impact is indiscriminate and lethal, in many cases life ending, in all others life changing. For a while, chaos reigns in the city. Then come the calls for action and the pledges of revenge. Five years ago the city was London. Yesterday morning it was Moscow.
What happened yesterday at two Moscow underground stations was barbaric. Violence of this kind against innocent people is intolerable wherever it occurs. Quite rightly, there is a reflexive sense of solidarity between those who have suffered from terrorist outrages. Many Londoners know what many Muscovites have just experienced. Countries such as Britain, Spain and India, all of which have endured long and difficult battles against their own terrorists, as well as lethal terror attacks on their urban transport systems, have lessons – mistakes as well as successes – to share with the Russians.
Our societies face a similar scourge. But we do not face a common enemy. It is important that we do not pretend otherwise, not least because the world is riddled with indefensible actions taken by states with varying degrees of justification in the name of a common struggle against terrorism. Most terrorism has local not global roots and most solutions are local too. The logic, if that is the right word, of the bombings lies in several previous attacks over the past decade and in Moscow's often ruthless and occasionally incompetent responses to them. This in turn is rooted in the bitter nexus of Moscow's relationship with its subject territories in the north Caucacus, a relationship that stretches back beyond the Soviet era to the imperial age. The bombers' choice of the Lubyanka underground station, underneath the headquarters of the FSB security police, as a target was surely very deliberate.
At the very least yesterday's bombs question Russian claims to have quelled the insurgencies in the north Caucasus. A brutal stability may now exist by comparison with the era of the Chechen wars, but it has been achieved at the cost of massive and ongoing human rights violations. Yesterday's bombings follow last month's escalation of Russian action against insurgents in Ingushetia, which killed the suspected leader of the team that bombed the Moscow to St Petersburg express train in November. Rebels duly threatened reprisals that now seem to have occurred in the Moscow Metro. Russia's dirty war is not over after all. And, as so often, the innocent are the first to suffer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/30/russia-suicide-bombers-editorial
The 'free pass' Western MSM are giving the FSB bothers me.
Wait. That's right. The New York Times cannot report something until at least a couple of months after a story has appeared in The Economist.
Source is here (http://www.economist.com/world/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15731344).Police brutality in Russia
Cops for hire
Mar 18th 2010 | MOSCOW
From The Economist print edition
Reforming Russia’s violent and corrupt police will not be easy
THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.
Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.
Police violence is not new in Russia, but a recent wave of publicity is. A simple explanation is that police lawlessness has exhausted people’s patience and that pent-up anger has finally burst into newspapers, websites and even state television. The internet makes it harder to hush things up. Earlier this month a Moscow motorist posted a video online alleging that he and several other drivers were used as human shields by traffic police trying to catch an armed criminal.
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s web-aware president, has been quick to respond. He has fired Moscow’s police chief, ordered an overhaul of Russia’s arcane gulag system and called for reform of the interior ministry. Yet this reform involves cutting police numbers by 20% and centralising control over regional police.
Ordinary policemen, many of whom despise their own service, seem baffled and angered—not by the claims of abuse, which almost no one disputes, but by the hypocrisy of their bosses, who have turned them into scapegoats. Some have started to spill the beans on their superiors.
The rot has now set in so deep that real reform of Russian policing would mean reform of state power, says Sergei Kanev, a crime reporter for Novaya Gazeta. The main function of law-enforcement agencies in Russia is not to protect the public from crime and corruption, but to shield the bureaucracy, including themselves, from the public.
To ensure loyalty the system allows police and security services to make money from their licence for violence. Police escorts can be officially purchased. Other commercial activities include charging for proper investigation, extortion, selling sensitive databases, tapping phones or raiding businesses for competitors. Many police officers have their own private business on the side. Unsurprisingly, top jobs in the police are a valuable, and traded, commodity. Most new recruits sign up to make money, according to internal questionnaires. As Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a businessman serving an eight-year prison sentence on trumped-up charges, has written, the police, prosecution and prison services are component parts of an industry whose business is legitimised violence and which uses people as raw material.
Yet even as thousands of businessmen lose their livelihoods or serve time on bogus charges, bureaucrats guilty of real crimes are escaping lightly. In recent days a police officer who murdered an independent journalist in Ingushetia was put under house arrest after the court decided that his two-year penal-colony sentence was overly harsh. Seven time zones to the east, a customs official found guilty of trading in contraband was given a suspended three-year sentence.
Ultimately, the police are instruments in the hands of a more powerful institution: the Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB, which remains outside public control and above criticism. The Russian police service is not only headed by a former FSB operative but is packed with its people, says Vladimir Pastukhov of the Russian Institute of Law and Public Policy, a think-tank. The FSB can dabble in any business it likes, but relies on the police to do the footwork. Serious police reform is therefore impossible if the masters are left alone.
The FSB, a factional body with its own vested interests, has a near-monopoly on the repressive functions of the state. More worryingly, it relies on its traditional links to organised crime. Mr Kanev, who has investigated some of the most high-profile kidnappings of wealthy businessmen and their relatives, says few of them could take place without the knowledge and even collusion of former and current members of the security services.
Commercial kidnappings—once the prerogative of Chechnya—are now big business in Moscow. Many cases, says Mr Kanev, never get reported; instead, the victim quietly pays up. This is what people in occupied territories do.
Another bomb in Russia
http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE62U0M120100331
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A bomb exploded in the centre of the town of Kizlyar in Russia's turbulent North Caucasus region of Dagestan Wednesday, causing casualties, Itar-Tass news agency quoted police as saying.
The blast occurred near a cinema, the agency said. It gave no further details.
Monday, twin suicide bombings killed 39 people on Moscow's metro underground rail network.
The deadliest attack in the Russian capital in six years fuelled fears of a broader offensive by rebels based in the North Caucasus and underscored the Kremlin's failure to keep militants in check.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who led Moscow into a war against Chechen separatists in 1999 that sealed his rise to power, said Tuesday that those behind the bombings must be scraped "from the bottom of the sewers" and exposed.
Moscow observed a day of mourning Tuesday for the victims of the blasts, which authorities said were set off by female suicide bombers linked to the North Caucasus -- a string of heavily Muslim provinces that includes Chechnya.
incarcerated
03-31-2010, 02:01
Another bomb in Russia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8596084.stm
Twelve killed by twin bombings in Russia's Dagestan
Wednesday, 31 March 2010 10:06 UK
At least 12 people, including a top local police official, have been killed by two suicide bombings in Russia's North Caucasus republic of Dagestan.
A car bomb was detonated at about 0830 (0430 GMT) outside the offices of the local interior ministry and the FSB security agency in the town of Kizlyar.
Another bomber then blew himself up 20 minutes later as a crowd gathered.....
The BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow says that although it is too early to say whether there is a link between the attacks in Dagestan and Moscow, they both bear the hallmarks of previous suicide bombings carried out by Islamist militants from the restive region.
Last month, Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov warned that his fighters' "zone of military operations will be extended to the territory of Russia... the war is coming to their cities".
'Cancerous tumour'
In Wednesday's attacks, the first suicide bomber detonated his explosives when police tried to stop his car as he drove into the centre of Kizlyar, Dagestani Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said.
"Traffic police followed the car and almost caught up - at that time the blast hit," he told local television.
As police, emergency services personnel and residents gathered at the scene, a suicide bomber wearing a police uniform approached and blew himself up, killing among others the town's chief of police, Col Vitaly Vedernikov, Mr Nurgaliyev added.
A total of nine police officers were among the dead, the investigative committee of Russian prosecutors said in a statement. Twenty-three people were injured.....
incarcerated
04-05-2010, 01:33
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8603119.stm
Ingushetia hit by suicide attack
Monday, 5 April 2010 07:37 UK
A suicide attacker has killed at least two police officers in the Russian republic of Ingushetia, in the latest in a series of such bombings.
Shortly after the first attack, a car bomb was detonated in the same place in the town of Karabulak, officials said....
And so it goes...
Richard
Second Bomber in Moscow Attacks Is Identified
Clifford Levy, NYT, 6 Apr 2010
The second female suicide bomber who attacked the Moscow subway system last week was a 28-year-old teacher from a predominantly Muslim region of southern Russia who was married to an extremist leader, officials said on Tuesday.
The woman, Maryam Sharipova, was first identified by her father, and genetic tests confirmed that she carried out the attack during the morning rush hour on March 29. Ms. Sharipova was from the Dagestan region, in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, as was the other suicide bomber, a 17-year-old woman whose name was released last Friday.
Ms. Sharipova is believed to have been the suicide bomber at the Lubyanka station in central Moscow, a site apparently chosen because it is next to the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the K.G.B.
(cont'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/europe/07moscow.html?hp
Is this Caucasus Emirate group active in Af-Pak? I know Chechens were trained in Pak earlier and some have attacked India, but are they still coming to attack NATO troops?
Somewhat curious as it seems from Anzer Astemirov's statements that they are hinting for help from the West!
blue02hd
05-16-2010, 06:14
Is this Caucasus Emirate group active in Af-Pak? I know Chechens were trained in Pak earlier and some have attacked India, but are they still coming to attack NATO troops?
Somewhat curious as it seems from Anzer Astemirov's statements that they are hinting for help from the West!
Harpy,
Research "Black Widows" and you may start to understand the connection. Here is a site that I quickly pulled up that may help you get started.
http://globaljihad.net/view_page.asp?id=1301
I had the opportunity to give an hour long brief on this organization as well the umbrella group that they are associated under. Remember the Mosow Theater and Beslan School Tragedies? The Black Widows played a supporting role under the direction of then still breathing Shamil Basayev. Have they attacked Nato Forces in AF/ PAK? Yes. No better place to train if you have their ideology and endstate. IMHO though, Mother Russia (and Mr Putnum to be sure) remains their primary tgt.
Hope this helped.