Woman Suicide Bomber Kills
16 Near Chechnya
Thu June 5, 2003 07:15 AM ET
By Richard Balmforth
MOSCOW (Reuters) -
A woman suicide bomber ambushed a bus carrying Russian air force pilots near
rebel Chechnya on Thursday, blowing it up and killing at least 16 people, defense
and justice officials said.
The attack was the third in three weeks by women suicide guerrillas fighting for
Chechen independence and came on the eve of a Russian parliament vote on a partial
amnesty for rebel fighters designed to improve prospects for a Kremlin peace plan.
The attack occurred in Russia's North Ossetia region, bordering Muslim Chechnya,
after the bus carrying the pilots and a group of civilians attached to the air
force stopped near a railway crossing on the outskirts of Mozdok.
"A terrorist-suicide woman blew it up," defense ministry spokesman Nikolai Deryabin
said.
Officials said the woman tried to board the bus, which stopped to take on workers,
and then detonated the bomb when she was unable to do so.
In Moscow, Russia's prosecutor general told President Vladimir Putin, who vowed
to crush the Chechen rebellion when he took office in 2000, that 16 people had
been killed. About 12 others were wounded.
Efforts would be launched to find out where and how suicide fighters -- a relatively
new phenomenon in Chechnya -- were being trained, Vladimir Ustinov said in a televised
encounter with Putin. "We will locate their training centers and trace their funding
sources," he said.
Eight servicemen were among the dead, including four air force officers, officials
said.
WORK OF CHECHEN REBELS
Putin, who will seek re-election early next year, has been pushing a peace plan
for Chechnya following a Kremlin-organized referendum in March that locked the
region into Russia.
North Ossetia is the springboard for Russian military operations in Chechnya and
has escaped relatively unscathed from violence since the conflict erupted in 1994.
Russian officials assumed the attack was the work of Chechen rebels.
On May 12 a woman was part of a group that drove a truck packed with explosives
into a government complex in Znamenskoye in northern Chechnya, killing 59 people.
Two days later a woman blew herself up at a Muslim festival in another part of
Chechnya, killing at least 16 people.
Chechen separatist warlord Shamil Basayev has claimed responsibility for the two
attacks in May and threatened to launch "a whirlwind" of violence in the future.
Last March the Kremlin, as part of its peace plan, staged a constitutional referendum
that anchored the territory in Russia and has set dates for parliamentary and
presidential elections.
As part of the plan the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, was to
take a final vote on Friday to bring a partial amnesty into force.
Chechen rebels and human rights groups have ridiculed the limitations of the amnesty
offer, saying it excludes hard-core fighters while benefiting many Russian servicemen
suspected of abuses in the region.