Putin insists Chechens not behind deadly Moscow airport bombing

Published on Wednesday 26 January 2011 16:37

RUSSIAN prime minister Vladimir Putin has said those behind a deadly suicide attack on a Moscow airport were unlikely to be from Chechnya - but analysts and media said North Caucasus militants were to blame.

No-one has yet claimed responsibility for the Monday attack which killed 35 people - including Scottish businessman Gordon Campbell Cousland - and injured 100, and which bore the hallmark of Islamist rebels.

Mr Putin said: "This terrorist act, according to preliminary data, has no relation to the Chechen Republic."

Mr Putin, who launched a war against Chechen rebels in 1999, refused to clarify his comment, which is likely to prompt speculation that the attackers came from another republic in Russia's violence-plagued North Caucasus, such as Ingushetia or Dagestan, which is considered the heart of the insurgency.

The Kremlin says it has succeeded in subduing rebellion in Chechnya.

As Russia observed a day of mourning yesterday, analysts and media pointed the finger of blame directly at militants in the North Caucasus fighting for an Islamic state.

"There is no doubt," North Caucasus expert Alexei Malashenko, from the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, said when asked if North Caucasus rebels were behind the attack.

He said: "I cannot imagine someone from the Middle East or Kaliningrad (in western Russia] doing this."

He added that the North Caucasus rebels were not mere bandits but people on a political mission.

President Dmitry Medvedev and Mr Putin, his mentor, visited separate Orthodox Church memorial services yesterday as Moscow began sending victims' bodies to their hometowns across Russia and abroad.

Mr Medvedev sacked transport official Andrei Alexeyev, who oversaw much of central Russia, including Moscow, the Kremlin said.

He also ordered interior minister Rashid Nurgaliyev to install more efficient warning systems at transport hubs.

In signs implicating militants from the North Caucasus, one of Russia's most popular newspapers yesterday said the group behind the airport bombing had planned an attack on Moscow on New Year's Eve but were foiled.

Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that a woman planned to blow herself up amid the crowds ringing in the new year near Red Square, but her plot failed when the bomb was set off by accident, most probably via a mobile phone, killing her in her flat.

It added that the would-be suicide bomber had probably received a spam text message congratulating her on the New Year at around 8:30pm, setting off the bomb, which shattered her apartment.Two other suspects, including the wife of a North Caucasus rebel, were detained as they fled Moscow on 5 January. However, others connected to them were able to plan the Domodedovo Airport bomb in a Moscow suburb, the paper wrote.

Twin suicide bombings on the Moscow metro in March last year, which killed 40 people, were carried out by two women from the North Caucasus region of Dagestan.

The latest bombing has demoralised many Russians, weary of years of separatist violence in Chechnya and other parts of the southern Caucasus region and of terrorist attacks attributed to the separatists.

"It has already been happening for so many years and there is a feeling it will never end," said Inna Guliyants, who attended a service at Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral as part of the capital's official day of mourning for the bombing victims.