A BOMB caused the derailment of a Russian high-speed train that killed dozens and injured nearly 100, a senior official said yesterday, in the worst attack on the country’s heartland in five years.
The 14-carriage Nevsky Express, carrying 682 passengers and 29 crew, was derailed on Friday night on the busy main line between Moscow and Russia’s second city, St Petersburg.
“A bomb equivalent to 7 kg of TNT was detonated,” the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) domestic intelligence agency, Alexander Bortnikov, told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, citing the results of a preliminary investigation.
Since a spate of suicide bombings and attacks in Moscow in 2004, analysts say suspected terrorism incidents have traditionally triggered probes into any link to separatists in Chechnya, where Moscow has fought two wars in the last 15 years.
No one has publicly claimed responsibility for the latest train disaster.
Detectives said they had found fragments of what they believed was a bomb and opened a criminal case on charges of terrorism. A Reuters photographer saw a 1-metre wide crater under the rails, one of which was twisted.
The chief of Russia’s state railway operator, Vladimir Yakunin, said a second bomb had detonated at the site yesterday afternoon, though no one was injured.
The attack, Russia’s worst outside the turbulent North Caucasus since the 2004 bombings, has stoked fears of a surge in attacks in Russia’s historic heartland by Islamist rebels.
The force of the blast jolted at least two carriages off the rails at 9.34pm on Friday near the village of Uglovka, about 350 km north of Moscow.
Hundreds of rescue workers toiled through the night to search for survivors, cutting through the tangled steel of at three train carriages which lay battered beside the rails.
A Reuters television crew saw conscripts in camouflage carrying bodies away from the scene through the surrounding woods. One body was wrapped in rags.
Russia’s Emergency Ministry said at least 26 people had been confirmed dead with another 18 missing, though one rescue official earlier put the death toll as high as 39. The ministry said 96 people had been injured.
Medvedev, speaking to senior officials at an emergency meeting, sent his condolences to the families of the dead and told ministers to ensure everyone received proper medical care and compensation.
Some witnesses said they heard a loud bang, but another passenger told reporters in St Petersburg there had been no blast. An elderly woman who lives in a nearby log cabin said: “I thought it was an earthquake – the ground shook.”
Russian Railways chief Yakunin told reporters at the scene he believed the blast showed many similarities to an explosion in August 2007 which derailed a similar Nevsky Express train on the same route, injuring 30 people.
Prosecutors at the time arrested two residents of the mainly Muslim North Caucasus region of Ingushetia, but said the mastermind behind the attack was ex-soldier Pavel Kosolapov, a former associate of late Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev.
An upsurge in attacks this year along the mainly Muslim republics which make up Russia’s southern flank have raised fears that Islamist rebels could mount a new wave of attacks in Russia’s historic heartland around Moscow and St Petersburg.
The spate of bombings in 2004 was followed by the Beslan school hostage crisis.
“The so-called Chechen trace is traditionally viewed as the main one during investigations of such disasters,” said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst at the Centre for Political Information.
But Mukhin added that outdated Soviet-era infrastructure was often the cause of major accidents in Russia.
Friday’s railway disaster was the deadliest since December 2003 when a bomb blast tore through a passenger train in the North Caucasus, killing 47 people.
The derailment has delayed about 27,000 people as transport officials try to divert trains onto smaller lines, railway officials said.
