Russian police said yesterday they had detained two suspects for the bombing of a busy Moscow underpass which killed seven people but President Vladimir Putin warned against automatically linking it to the war in Chechnya.
Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov denied his separatist forces were involved in the blast, which tore through tunnels leading from a main underground railway station on Tuesday. More than 90 people were injured. The site of the blast has become a place of mourning, with people laying flowers and standing, some in tears, staring at the devastation.
Despite the detention of suspects, one of whom was a Chechen, Putin said it was too early to jump to conclusions. “According to early estimates by experts it was a crime,” Putin said in televised comments. “Regarding the suggestions of a terrorist act, I must say it is wrong to look for an ethnic connection, Chechen connection in this or any other crime,” he added.
Interfax news agency also quoted him as saying the blast could have been a settling of accounts between criminal gangs. Putin, whose rise to power was helped by his firm support for the campaign in Chechnya, took personal control of the investigation amid fears of a repeat of a wave of bombings which struck Moscow last year and killed nearly 300 people. The blasts were one of the reasons Russia invaded Chechnya and launched its second war in the region in three years. The FSB said the two men it had detained were a Chechen and an ethnic Avary from another North Caucasus republic, Dagestan.
“We do not exclude they were both behind the terrorist act,” said Vladimir Pronichev, first deputy chief of the FSB domestic security police. Interfax quoted the FSB as saying three other Chechens had been detained on suspicion of planning a bomb attack in the southern town of Saratov.
A tie to the campaign in Chechnya has been in most Russians’ minds after the blast amid warnings of attacks to mark the anniversary of a battle which ended the 1994-96 Chechen war. But Maskhadov denied any involvement.
“The press service of the president of the Chechen republic of Ichkeria is empowered to declare that attempts by the Russian side to blame the terrorist act on Pushkin Square on Chechen resistance fighters has no foundation,” a statement said. Reuters