.Moscow fears tide of Black Widows
Russian security services were hunting for more “Black Widows” yesterday amid fears that the women who blew themselves up in the Moscow Metro were part of a 30-strong suicide squad trained by a Chechen terrorist leader.
Agents from the Federal Security Service (FSB) believe that the women were avenging the death of Said Buryatsky, the leading ideologue of the Islamist rebels in the North Caucasus, who was killed this month in Ingushetia. They were trying to establish whether the attack was a one-off response to his death or the start of a suicide bombing campaign that he had prepared before the FSB tracked him down.
Moscow observed a day of mourning as a woman who died in hospital became the bombers’ 39th victim. Police circulated grisly photographs of the facial remains of the Black Widows in an attempt to identify the women who blew themselves up on trains at Lubyanka station, next to the FSB’s headquarters, and at Park Kultury.
Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, urged security chiefs to drag out “from the bottom of the sewers” those who had planned the bombings, in language that recalled his 1999 pledge to pursue terrorists and “waste them in the outhouse”. He said: “It’s a matter of honour for law enforcement bodies to scrape them from the bottom of the sewers and into the daylight.”
President Medvedev has threatened to destroy the people behind Moscow’s worst terrorist attack for six years. But he also urged officials to improve living conditions in the North Caucasus to draw people away from extremism. “People want a normal and decent life, no matter where they live,” he said.
Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed President, offered a characteristic response in the newspaper Izvestia, writing: “We believe that terrorists must be hunted down; they must be poisoned like rats.”
Buryatsky, a Muslim convert who was born Alexander Tikhomirov, was among six militants killed in an FSB operation in Ingushetia on March 2. The Kremlin described him then as the mastermind behind a bomb attack on the Nevsky Express train between Moscow and St Petersburg that killed 26 and wounded 100 in November.
He was also blamed for the suicide bombing that almost succeeded in assassinating Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, Ingushetia’s President, last June and the attack in August that devastated the main police station in Nazran, the Ingush capital, killing 20 officers.
Kommersant newspaper reported that the FSB believed nine of the thirty bombers trained by Buryatsky had blown themselves up. The rest were still at large, raising fears that more were in Moscow.
Mr Yevkurov ordered security services to check on relatives of militants killed in recent police operations in Ingushetia to establish if any were linked with the Metro attacks. The FSB was also said to be checking lists of relatives of those killed alongside Buryatsky, particularly women.
Dozens of contributors to websites affiliated to al-Qaeda left messages praising the attacks in Moscow. One site opened a special page to “receive congratulations” for the Black Widows who, it said, had “started the dark tunnel attacks in the apostate countries”.
In a sign of the anxiety sweeping Moscow, Christ the Saviour Cathedral was evacuated after a bomb threat. About 100 people were saying prayers for the bomb victims when police cleared the building to hunt for devices before giving the all-clear.
Buryatsky was the right-hand man to Doku Umarov, the self-styled emir of a planned Islamist state stretching across the North Caucasus. Umarov threatened last month that he would soon take the war to Russia, saying: “Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns.”
Umarov, 45, fought in both of Chechnya’s separatist wars with Russia in the 1990s and served as its security minister during its brief spell of independence. The security services have repeatedly proclaimed him to have been killed, most recently last June, but he continues to elude them.
He once rejected attacks on civilians but shifted tack recently, saying: “We try to avoid civilian targets but for me there are no civilians in Russia. Why? Because a genocide of our people is being carried out with their consent.”
Timesonline
Agents from the Federal Security Service (FSB) believe that the women were avenging the death of Said Buryatsky, the leading ideologue of the Islamist rebels in the North Caucasus, who was killed this month in Ingushetia. They were trying to establish whether the attack was a one-off response to his death or the start of a suicide bombing campaign that he had prepared before the FSB tracked him down.
Moscow observed a day of mourning as a woman who died in hospital became the bombers’ 39th victim. Police circulated grisly photographs of the facial remains of the Black Widows in an attempt to identify the women who blew themselves up on trains at Lubyanka station, next to the FSB’s headquarters, and at Park Kultury.
Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, urged security chiefs to drag out “from the bottom of the sewers” those who had planned the bombings, in language that recalled his 1999 pledge to pursue terrorists and “waste them in the outhouse”. He said: “It’s a matter of honour for law enforcement bodies to scrape them from the bottom of the sewers and into the daylight.”
President Medvedev has threatened to destroy the people behind Moscow’s worst terrorist attack for six years. But he also urged officials to improve living conditions in the North Caucasus to draw people away from extremism. “People want a normal and decent life, no matter where they live,” he said.
Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed President, offered a characteristic response in the newspaper Izvestia, writing: “We believe that terrorists must be hunted down; they must be poisoned like rats.”
Buryatsky, a Muslim convert who was born Alexander Tikhomirov, was among six militants killed in an FSB operation in Ingushetia on March 2. The Kremlin described him then as the mastermind behind a bomb attack on the Nevsky Express train between Moscow and St Petersburg that killed 26 and wounded 100 in November.
He was also blamed for the suicide bombing that almost succeeded in assassinating Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, Ingushetia’s President, last June and the attack in August that devastated the main police station in Nazran, the Ingush capital, killing 20 officers.
Kommersant newspaper reported that the FSB believed nine of the thirty bombers trained by Buryatsky had blown themselves up. The rest were still at large, raising fears that more were in Moscow.
Mr Yevkurov ordered security services to check on relatives of militants killed in recent police operations in Ingushetia to establish if any were linked with the Metro attacks. The FSB was also said to be checking lists of relatives of those killed alongside Buryatsky, particularly women.
Dozens of contributors to websites affiliated to al-Qaeda left messages praising the attacks in Moscow. One site opened a special page to “receive congratulations” for the Black Widows who, it said, had “started the dark tunnel attacks in the apostate countries”.
In a sign of the anxiety sweeping Moscow, Christ the Saviour Cathedral was evacuated after a bomb threat. About 100 people were saying prayers for the bomb victims when police cleared the building to hunt for devices before giving the all-clear.
Buryatsky was the right-hand man to Doku Umarov, the self-styled emir of a planned Islamist state stretching across the North Caucasus. Umarov threatened last month that he would soon take the war to Russia, saying: “Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns.”
Umarov, 45, fought in both of Chechnya’s separatist wars with Russia in the 1990s and served as its security minister during its brief spell of independence. The security services have repeatedly proclaimed him to have been killed, most recently last June, but he continues to elude them.
He once rejected attacks on civilians but shifted tack recently, saying: “We try to avoid civilian targets but for me there are no civilians in Russia. Why? Because a genocide of our people is being carried out with their consent.”
Timesonline
posted by madtom at 8:52 PM
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