MOSCOW, 6 July 2003 — Two women suicide bombers killed at least 14 other people, one of them a child, when they blew themselves apart at an open-air rock festival staged at a Moscow airfield yesterday, Russian security forces said.
Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov blamed Chechens opposed to President Vladimir Putin’s plan, announced on Friday, to hold a local presidential election in Chechnya in October.
Moscow police spokesman Valery Gribakin told reporters in the early evening 14 people had died in the two blasts and at least 60 were injured. Gryzlov had originally put the toll at 16, excluding the bombers.
No one claimed responsibility. But First Deputy Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said the investigation had established a connection with Chechen separatists.
“A special operation has established that the suicide terrorists were directly connected with illegal armed groups,” he said. The explosives, he said, were similar to those used by Chechen commandos who seized a Moscow theatre last October.
Nurgaliyev said the dead included a child.
Women suicide bombers have only recently been used as a tactic by the most extreme of Chechen separatists fighting Russian rule for a decade. The Interior Ministry said one of the women bombers had been identified as a resident of Chechnya, born in 1983.
The women had been prevented from entering the site proper. They blew themselves up outside admission booths at Tushino airfield, where thousands had gathered for the all-day event featuring well-known Russian bands.
After arriving at the scene Interior Minister Gryzlov and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov stood behind a barrier staring at the body of a young dark-haired woman on the pavement, a gaping hole in her abdomen.
On Friday, Putin issued a decree ordering a local presidential election in Chechnya on Oct. 5. “I presume that this inhumane situation, this terrorist act, is linked with the staging of this event,” Gryzlov said.
“If the explosions had occurred on the field itself, the consequences would have been far more serious.”
The concert on a blisteringly hot day was being wound down gradually to prevent panic, with 200 buses sent to evacuate spectators. Many inside the grounds were unaware of the attack.
Witnesses said there was a 15-minute gap between the blasts. “The first explosion near the booth was quite powerful. There were bits and pieces of all sorts flying above lamp posts,” said Andrei Tsvetkov, in his thirties.
“The second was by an underground passage. When I got there I saw an area 10 meters square covered in plastic sheeting. There was no panic but people were certainly in shock.”
Putin sent his condolences to the victims’ families.
A representative of the Chechen leadership ousted when Russian troops launched their second military campaign in 1999 said exiled leaders had nothing to do with the blasts. “Even if the so-called Chechen link is found, let me say again that the leadership of the (separatist) Chechen Ichkeria Republic has nothing to do with such actions which it views as unacceptable,” Salambek Maigov told Ekho Moskvy radio.
Putin’s decree on Friday was a key part of a Kremlin plan for a political solution to Chechen separatism. He won support for a new regional constitution in a referendum in March.
Commandos, who operate in the mountainous region despite the presence of thousands of troops, reject the Kremlin plan and have vowed to press on with their campaign to oust the military.
Last October’s attack on the Moscow theatre left 129 hostages and 41 guerrillas dead. All but two of the captives died from the effects of a gas used by Russian special forces to disable the hostage-takers.
