MOSCOW, 28 July 2003 — A woman blew herself up at a security base in the center of rebel Chechnya yesterday in the latest of a string of suicide attacks by Chechen women fighters against Russian rule in the region.
The woman approached guards at the base in Tsatsan-Yurt, 30 km southeast of the regional capital Grozny, which accommodates a special security unit attached to the pro-Moscow head of the Chechen regional administration, Akhmad Kadyrov.
“There was a military review of troops going on when the woman tried to enter the building,” Shamsail Saraliyev, a public relations adviser to Kadyrov, told NTV television. The guards were suspicious of her. They asked her to stop and at that moment she blew herself up,” he said.
The bomber was killed and a woman passerby was slightly hurt, a spokesman for Kadyrov’s press service said. There were no details of the attacker’s identity, although witnesses said she was around 20 years old.
This is at least the fifth such attack, or attempted attack, since mid-May by Chechen women bombers trying to put pressure on Moscow to pull its troops from the region. Scores of people have been killed in the attacks which have extended to Moscow, putting the Russian capital on summer terror alert.
Kadyrov, who is expected to run for president in Kremlin-sponsored elections in October and is a hate figure for many independence fighters in Chechnya, was not at the base at the time of the attack, the spokesman said. But his son, Ramzan, a senior figure at the Tsatsan-Yurt security base, was conducting the military review. This lent strength to a report that Ramzan Kadyrov may have been the bomber’s target.
