Death toll in Russia bombing rises to 50, Putin lashes out

August 04, 2003 Posted: 10:26 Moscow time (06:26 GMT) 

ROSTOV-ON-DON (AP) - Rescuers stopped searching for victims of a suicide truck-bombing at a military hospital and relatives held the first funerals Sunday for the 50 people killed, while President
Vladimir Putin lashed out at the "laxity" he said has aided attackers in a series of deadly blasts that have racked Russia in recent months. The search was called off after rescuers combing the shattered remains of the four-story brick building with sniffer dogs said there was no hope of finding survivors at the site in the southern city of Mozdok, a major staging point for Russia's second military campaign against Chechen rebels in a decade. Overnight, rescue workers pulled the body of a surgical nurse and least four others from the ruins, bringing the death toll to 50, said Lt. Col. Yuri Miroshnichenko, spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry in southern Russia. Sixty-four injured victims remained hospitalized, he said. A truck packed with explosives crashed through the hospital gates on Friday night and exploded, destroying the main building with about 100 patients inside, many of them Russian soldiers wounded in Chechnya. Authorities have said they believe there was one suicide attacker in the Kamaz truck, which they said had been bought and sold several times in recent weeks. Two people who sold the truck have been detained as suspects, the Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky as saying. He said authorities  hope the detainees will lead them to "other participants in the crime" and that investigators are focusing on Chechnya, North
Ossetia - where the attack took place - and nearby regions. Citing unidentified law enforcement sources in North Ossetia, Interfax reported that authorities suspect Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev, one of the region's most powerful figures and a bane to Russia for years, was behind the attack. A Web site that has conveyed purported claims of responsibility by Basayev for past attacks has been inaccessible recently. Monday was pronounced an official day of mourning throughout Russia's North Caucasus Military District, but boxy wooden coffins decorated with dark-green wreaths arrived in Mozdok by plane and at least two funerals were held Sunday, according to televised reports. A hospital security guard who played on a local soccer team was buried in Mozdok, NTV reported, and the chief of the surgery department, Lt. Col. Alexander Dzutsev, was buried in the regional capital Vladikavkaz, Channel One said. "Everybody knew him, and he was respected by both his colleagues and his patients," a relative of Dzutsev said on Channel One. At the site of the blast, soldiers erected a small black marble memorial stone and a tall wooden cross. Boris Dzgoyev, Emergency Situations Minister in North Ossetia, said 42 bodies had been identified, and ministry officials said the dead included at least 22 military personnel. Officials had said earlier that at least 12 local residents, eight hospital workers and two police were among the dead. A series of suicide bombings in and around Chechnya and in Moscow has killed more than 150 people since May, and Friday's blast was the third devastating truck-bomb attack in southern Russia since December, when the headquarters of the Moscow-backed government in Chechnya was virtually destroyed in a bombing that killed 72 people. In a meeting late Sunday with Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov and Supreme Court chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev, Putin demanded that authorities do more to prevent such attacks, saying that "the laxity that we have seen in a series of cases, and which is conducive to crimes and terrorist acts, has gone beyond all bounds." "One develops the impression that the state somehow does not react or is not in condition to react to such  events," Interfax and state-run Rossiya television quoted Putin as saying. "We have several branches of power, like in a normal law-based state - legislative, executive, judicial. But upon each of them depends not only the abstract fate of the state but the concrete  lives of tens, hundreds and thousands of people," the reports quoted Putin as saying in the meeting, portions of which were shown on Rossiya without audio. Putin, who gained popularity in part because of his tough stance against Chechen rebels as prime minister in 1999 and then president the next year, has been unable to fulfill his promises to crush resistance and bring peace to the region. Russian officials have blamed most of the recent attacks on Chechen militants. On Sunday, military officials announced heightened security measures throughout the North Caucasus Military District, which includes Chechnya and surrounding regions. Large trucks will be barred military communities and the grounds of military hospitals and clinics, Interfax quoted Col. Igor Konoshenkov, an aide to the district commander, as saying. Parking lots will be moved at least
100 meters (yards) from buildings and other areas where people gather at military bases and units in the district, Konoshenkov said. He said security has been stepped up at important installations such as
fuel storage areas, weapons and ammunition dumps and living quarters of military personnel. On Saturday, Putin vowed that terrorist acts will not stop efforts to restore "normal peaceful life" in the
region. Russian forces withdrew from Chechnya following a 1994-1996 war that left separatists in charge. They returned in 1999 after incursions into an adjacent region and apartment-building bombings in Russian cities that that killed some 300 people. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Saturday that the explosives used Friday resembled those used in the apartment-house bombings. The Kremlin refuses to negotiate with rebels and has taken steps its says are designed to bring peace to Chechnya, including a regional presidential election scheduled for Oct. 5. Critics have questioned how fair elections can be held in conditions of war and have suggested that the vote is an attempt to legitimize Moscow-backed administration chief Akhmad Kadyrov's control over the region. On Sunday, Kadyrov formally announced his intention run in the election.

/The Associated Press/