Moscow holds day of mourning for victims of suicide bombing

July 08, 2003 Posted: 13:44 Moscow time (09:44 GMT) 

MOSCOW - The flag over the Kremlin flew at half-staff Tuesday as Moscow observed a day of mourning for 13 victims of a double suicide bombing at an outdoor rock festival.

Friends and relatives of the dead continued to bring flowers, poems  and messages to a makeshift shrine at the site of Saturday's bombings outside the Tushino airfield in northern Moscow, where a one-day Russian rock festival was being held. The Moscow mayor's office asked television stations to cancel entertainment programming as part of the mourning.

Two women blew themselves up about 10 minutes apart in crowds of people waiting to enter at the airfield's gates, killing themselves and 13 others and wounding about 60. Most of the victims were women in their early 20s.

No one has claimed responsibility for the blasts, but authorities have said they suspect they were the work of Chechen rebels. A passport reportedly found on one of the suicide bombers identifies her as Zulikhan Elikhadzhiyeva, a 19-year-old Chechnya resident.

"This is the real name of the terrorist and her real passport," said Alu Alkhanov, chief of Chechnya's Moscow-backed police force, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. He said Elikhadzhiyeva's brother was known to be a rebel fighter.

Russian media speculated that she had brought her internal passport, an all-purpose Russian identification document, in case police asked her for identification on the way to the concert, and had assumed the passport would be destroyed in the explosion. Police in Moscow frequently check IDs of people who look like they might be from Chechnya or other southern regions.

The daily newspaper Izvestia reported that experts from the Federal Security Service were able to read the information on the SIM card of one of the bombers' cell phones, which may help establish who she had been in contact with.

Meanwhile, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov defended the city's decision not to cancel other events, such as a beer festival, on the day of the bombings.

"We did the right thing by sending a clear answer to the terrorists that they will not be able to intimidate us or destroy, stop or spoil the city's life," Luzhkov said at a city government meeting, which began with a minute of silence.

/The Associated Press/