(The Associated Press distributed the following article by Sergei Venyavsky on December 5.)
ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia — A powerful bomb tore through a commuter train near Chechnya during morning rush hour Friday, killing 36 people and wounding scores of others in what authorities described as an act of terrorism.
The head of the Federal Security Service blamed the attack on four attackers, including three women, the Interfax news agency reported. The body of a male suicide bomber was found, with grenades still strapped to his legs, FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev told President Vladimir Putin (news – web sites), according to Interfax.
Putin called the attack “an attempt to destabilize the situation in the country on the eve of parliamentary elections,” the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. Russians vote in a new parliament on Sunday.
The force of the blast ? the second fatal attack on the line since September ? hurled some passengers from the car and trapped others under a mound of twisted, ragged metal. Bomb explosives experts carefully entered the wreckage to blow up undetonated explosives, setting off three booms, Russian state television reported.
Hospitals in the region admitted 148 wounded, said Maj. Gen. Nikolai Lityuk of the Emergency Situations Ministry. Twenty-nine passengers were only lightly injured.
Authorities are treating the attack as an act of terror, but did not single out the culprits, said Vladimir Rudyak, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in the region. He said the force of the blast was equal to 22 pounds of TNT.
“We will find those who did it, ” Boris Gryzlov, the interior minister and head of the biggest pro-Kremlin party competing in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. “The earth will be burning under their feet.”
The rebel Chechen government led by president Aslan Maskhadov denied it was responsible for the explosion in a statement distributed to news media.
“We repeat that the Chechen government is guided by the principles of international humanitarian law,” the statement said. “We therefore condemn any acts of violence that directly or indirectly target the civilian population anywhere in the world.”
In Moscow, Prosecutor General’s office spokeswoman Natalia Vishnyakova said that detectives were investigating many scenarios, including those tied with Sunday’s election for Russia’s lower house of parliament.
The Federal Security Service press service said along with the dead suicide bomber, some unexploded grenades and remnants of a bag believed to have carried the bomb were found. The bomb was filled with shrapnel, local prosecutors were quoted as telling Russian media.
The blast occurred in the second car at around 8 a.m., in a rush-hour attack that seemed calculated to kill and injure a maximum number of people. The train was approaching the station at Yessentuki, about 750 miles south of Moscow, and local health officials said it was carrying a large number of students from local schools and universities.
The force of the explosion toppled the car onto its side and fire fighters and ambulance workers struggled to pull victims from the buckled mounds of wreckage. Hours after the blast, rescue workers continued to pull dead from underneath the carriage.
Patrushev, the head of the Federal Security Service, said that two women jumped from the train just before the explosion, Interfax reported. The male suicide bomber has not been identified. Patrushev did not say what happened to the third alleged female attacker.
Six people were killed in two blasts on the same train line in September. No group claimed responsibility for those attacks.
A series of suicide bombings and other attacks have rocked the region in and around Chechnya and Moscow this year.
In June, a female suicide attacker detonated a bomb near a bus carrying soldiers and civilians to work at a military airfield near Mozdok, the headquarters for Russian troops in the Caucasus region, killing at least 16 people. A month earlier, a suicide truck-bombing in Chechnya killed 72 people and a woman blew herself up at a religious ceremony, killing at least 18 people.
A double suicide bombing at a rock concert in Moscow on July 5 killed the female attackers and 15 other people. Soon after that, bomb experts said a woman suicide bomber from Chechnya set off an explosion on a Moscow street, killing a bomb disposal expert.
Russian forces have been bogged down in Chechnya since 1999, when they returned following rebel raids on a neighboring Russian region. Earlier, they fought an unsuccessful 1994-96 war against separatists that ended in de facto independence for the region.