YESSENTUKI, Russia, 6 December 2003 — A powerful blast tore through a commuter train near Chechnya during morning rush hour yesterday, killing 40 people and wounding scores of others in what authorities said was a suicide bombing.
Fragments of the suspected bomber’s body were found with grenades attached to his feet, Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev told President Vladimir Putin in a televised meeting. Patrushev said three women were also involved in the attack, including two who jumped from the train before the blast and one who was injured and unlikely to survive.
Putin called the attack “an attempt to destabilize the situation in the country on the eve of parliamentary elections.” Russians vote for a new Parliament tomorrow.
The force of the blast 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.
Bloodstained clothes littered the mangled inside of the railway carriage, packed a few hours earlier with students, as rescuers pursued their grisly search for body parts strewn around. Under the bright winter sun, people wandered around in shock, talking in hushed tones.
Yury Lichkaty, 55, was seated in the train when a deafening boom suddenly rocked his carriage, sending the luggage racks crashing down, tearing the floor apart and punching a gaping hole in the roof.
“The woman who was in front of me died on the spot. I managed to crawl out though a door which was half-open but I was hit by the luggage-racks and glass fragments cut my head,” he said from his hospital bed, his head swathed in bandages.
Galina Fedosova, deputy health minister in the Stavropol region, said 40 people were killed. She sad 34 died at the scene and six in hospitals.
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 regional prosecutor’s office. He said the force of the blast was equal to 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of TNT.
“We will find those who did it,” said Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov, who also heads the biggest pro-Kremlin party competing in tomorrow’s elections. “The earth will be burning under their feet,” the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.
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.”
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.
