Checens up to no good...

[Sinn Fein]

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Ten people were killed and 51 injured by a female suicide bomber in busy central Moscow on Tuesday evening, officials said.


Reuters Photo


AFP
Slideshow: Moscow Suicide Bomber Kills Eight, Injures 34




An Islamist group claimed responsibility for the bombing at the crowded Riga metro station and vowed there would be more attacks on "infidel" Russia, according to a statement published on a Web site.


The blast follows a series of suicide attacks in Russia over the past year, including near simultaneous plane crashes exactly a week ago, all of them linked by officials to Chechen rebels seeking independence from Moscow.


"We in the Islambouli Brigades announce our responsibility for this operation... which comes in support of Muslims of Chechnya (news - web sites)," said the statement signed by the group, which had earlier also claimed responsibility for last week's plane crashes in Russia.


Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov said the bomber had tried to enter the station, but became unnerved by some police.


"She...was at the door when she saw two policeman. She was scared and turned and decided to destroy herself," Luzhkov said.


"Up to 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of explosive was used," Luzhkov told reporters at the scene. "This is an unusual amount of explosive for a woman suicide bomber. There was a desire to cause maximum damage."


He said four children and 11 women were among the injured.


Seven people, including the suicide bomber, were killed on the spot. Officials later said the death toll had reached 10 with at least 51 injured, all but two of them sent to hospital.


Police said the bomb had been packed with metal bolts.


Local television channels, unusually, broke into their evening programs to show footage of a blazing car parked between a large shopping center and the entrance to the metro station, with several bodies lying on the pavement.


LAST DAY OF SCHOOL HOLIDAYS


The explosion came on the last day of the summer school holidays when parents and their children were certain to be doing last-minute pre-school shopping.


"It was like a big thunder clap. I was just coming out of the shop. There was one explosion, then another small one, probably from gas," Alexei Borodin, 29, told Reuters.


"I saw five people who could not stand up. And there were other people who were in small bits. There was one man without a stomach shouting: 'Where are the police?"'


Exactly a week ago, 90 people died when two Russian airliners crashed almost simultaneously in what officials believe was the work of suicide bombers.


Russian officials have described that air disaster as a terrorist act and have pointed the finger at Chechen rebels who have been battling Moscow rule for more than a decade.





And President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites), who has consistently refused to negotiate with rebels, said investigators were probing a possible link between al Qaeda and Chechen rebels in the attack.

FOLLOWS ELECTION

The latest blast follows Sunday's election for a new president in Chechnya, easily won by the Kremlin-backed candidate and which separatist rebels had vowed to disrupt.

At a meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi with the leaders of France and Germany, Putin also defended the election, which was denounced by rights groups as stage-managed, and by Washington and the European Union (news - web sites) as seriously flawed.

Tass quoted its police source as saying the explosive device used in southern Moscow and Tuesday's bomb were similar.

In July last year two women suicide bombers, thought to be Chechens, killed 15 other people when they blew themselves up at an open-air rock festival at a Moscow airfield.

Six months later another female bomber killed five people near the Kremlin.

And in February, an apparent suicide bomber set off an explosion that tore through a packed Moscow underground train in Moscow in morning rush-hour killing up to 40 people.

(Additional reporting by Oleg Shchedrov)