3 Injured in South Russia Blast to Be Transported to Moscow

2013/10/21

VOLGOGRAD, October 22 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian Emergencies Ministry aircraft will on Tuesday take three people of those injured in yesterday’s suicide bomb attack in south Russia to Moscow, regional authorities said.


The plane, a Ilyushin Il-76 Candid airlifter, specially equipped to transport those wounded, will bring a 34-year-old woman and a 61-year-old man, who are currently in intensive care, and a woman with facial burns to clinics in the Russian capital, Volgograd Region Governor Sergei Bozhenov said.


At least six people were killed and 28 wounded Monday after a suspected female suicide bomber detonated an explosive device on a bus in the southern city of Volgograd.


Investigators said preliminary information indicated the attack had been carried out by Naida Asiyalova, a 30-year-old woman from Russia’s republic of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus, which has been riven by unrest since the mid-1990s.


The government has implemented a wide range of measures to eliminate terrorist threats in Russia’s restive south as the country prepares to host the Winter Olympics early next year in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. The attack, if proved to have been carried out by a female suicide bomber, will serve as a reminder of the persisting dangers from a decades-long insurgency in the North Caucasus.


Attacks on security forces, police and civilians generated by ethnic, religious and political rivalries, as well as poverty and corruption, occur regularly in the North Caucasus. The violence is also fed by an Islamist insurgency, which has been especially resilient in Dagestan and has fueled a series of separatist wars in the neighboring republic of Chechnya.


Suicide attacks by women in the early 2000s became a trademark tactic used by Islamist militants against civilian targets. Transportation has frequently constituted a soft target for attacks.


Suicide attacks carried out by two women from Dagestan on Moscow metro stations in 2010 left about 40 dead and some 100 injured.


Updated to include details in graf 2, recast context in last few grafs.



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