- Update : Blood on the Tracks, Roland Oliphant, Russia Profile, November 30, 2009: The Professionalism of the Attack Suggests Islamist Terrorists from the North Caucasus Have Struck Deep Inside Russia Once Again. “The attack on the Neva Express has traumatized the nation. Coverage of the incident has dominated the news for the past three days. President Dmitry Medvedev has issued his own statement of condolences to the families of the injured and killed. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, on Sunday hosted a memorial service in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, in which he condemned the terrorists for breaking “not only the law of man, but the law of God.” But amid the mourning, professionals are looking hard at who carried out the attack – and why… ” Also : A Sickening Bombing in Russia, Roland Oliphant, The Faster Times, December 1, 2009.
More death in Russia. Smash your head on the punk rawk!
Russian train blast raises terrorism fears
Clifford Levy
The Age [The New York Times]
November 30, 2009THE cause of the crash of one of Russia’s most illustrious trains has been confirmed as a bomb that went off on the tracks between Moscow and St Petersburg, killing more than 25 people, wounding scores of others and raising fears of a new era of terrorism.
Officials called the weekend explosion the worst terrorist attack in Russia in years, outside volatile Muslim parts of the North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya. There were no immediate credible claims of responsibility…
Steve Gutterman writes (‘Victims being identified after Russian train wreck’, AP): “Nationalists were blamed in a similar blast that caused a derailment along the same railway line in 2007, injuring 27 passengers. Authorities arrested two suspects in the [August 13] 2007 train blast and are searching for a third, a former military officer.”
Which may or may not be the case. However, if you were to substitute ‘anarchists’ for ‘nationalists’, the story does recall the attempted framing of anarchists for the crime (see : Russian anarchists still languishing in police custody, September 1, 2007). However, after having used the incident as a pretext for the political repression of anarchists, Russian authorities “later 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”.
Of the 2007 rail bombing and subsequent trial:
Train Bombing Suspects Claim Torture
Alexandra Odynova
The St. Petersburg Times
July 3, 2009MOSCOW — Two Ingush suspects charged in the 2007 bombing of a Moscow-St. Petersburg train told a court Tuesday that they had been tortured by police and subjected to interrogations in a forest and a cellar rather than the police station. The suspects, Maksharip Khidriyev and Salambek Dzakhiyev, both 41, maintained their innocence in opening statements made to a Novgorod court at the start of their trial for the bombing, which injured 30 passengers and derailed the Nevsky Express train…
Elsewhere, Combat 18 rears its stoopid head (Description Released of Train Bombing Suspect, The Other Russia): “The neo-Nazi organization Militant Autonomous Group Combat 18 (Ingria) allegedly took responsibility for the attack, which Russian authorities are calling a terrorist act, but ultranationalist[s] are calling the announcement a provocation to frame them in the incident. Investigators do not consider Combat 18’s claim to be credible…”
Leaving aside the almost certainly bogus claim of responsibility by some Russian nutzis, the media is drawing a close comparison between this latest bombing and earlier terrorist attacks, especially ‘the Moscow theater hostage crisis’ of October 2002. This incident was handled superbly by the Russian state, with Spetsnaz pumping poisonous gas into the theatre, killing at least 129 of the hostages. The official investigation was, much like other official investigations, by any state, a sham also a complete success: failing, as it did, to provide positive information on the gas agent that killed the hostages; any possible antidote to that agent; the number of hostages released by the operation; the number of militants who seized the theatre; and the names of the officials responsible for conducting the assault.
Unpatriotic elements have called for an independent inquiry, which is now dying a slow death in the EU courts. The fate of those Russians who undertook an investigation of their own into the ‘crisis’ suggests that this is a slightly dangerous undertaking:
An independent investigation of the event was undertaken by Russian politicians Sergei Yushenkov, Sergei Kovalev, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Hoover Institute scholar John B. Dunlop, and former FSB officers Aleksander Litvinenko and Mikhail Trepashkin. According to their version, FSB knew about the terrorist group prior to its arrival in Moscow and actually directed the group to the theatre through their agent provocateur Khanpasha Terkibayev (“Abu Bakar”), whose name was included in the list of hostage takers and who left the theatre alive. At the beginning of April 2003, Litvinenko gave information about Terkibayev (“the Terkibayev file”) to Sergei Yushenkov when he visited London. Yushenkov passed this file to Politkovskaya and she was able to interview Terkibayev in person. A few days later, Yushenkov was assassinated by gunfire in Moscow. Terkibayev was later killed in an apparent car crash in Chechnya.
In June 2003, Litvinenko stated in an interview with the Australian television program Dateline, that two of the Chechen militants involved in the siege—whom he named as “Abdul the Bloody” and “Abu Bakar”—were working for the FSB, and that the agency manipulated the terrorists into staging the attack. Litvinenko said: “[w]hen they tried to find [Abdul the Bloody and Abu Bakar] among the rotting corpses of dead terrorists, they weren’t there. The FSB got its agents out. So the FSB agents among Chechens organized the whole thing on FSB orders, and those agents were released.” The story about FSB connections with the hostage takers was also put forward by Mikhail Trepashkin. “Abu Bakar” (presumably Terkibayev) was also described as an FSB agent and the actual organizer of the terrorist act by Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Khinshtein and other journalists.
Sergei Yushenkov was murdered on April 17, 2003; Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on October 7 (Vladimir Putin’s birthday) in 2006; Alexander Litvinenko was murdered on November 23, 2006. Stanislav Markelov — who acted as a lawyer for Politkovskaya — was murdered on January 19, 2009; Anastasia Baburova — a journalist who, like Politkovskaya, wrote for Novaya Gazeta — was murdered alongside Markelov.
Prior to the 2003 “crisis”, there was another series of ‘terrorist attacks’, in September, 1999. On this occasion, presumed terrorists — allegedly belonging to the ‘Liberation Army of Dagestan’, a group which emerged to claim the bombings and has since disappeared — exploded bombs in a number of apartment buildings in the cities of Buynaksk (September 4), Moscow (September 9 and 13), and Volgodonsk (September 16). Hundreds were killed or wounded, the bombings were followed by the outbreak of the ‘Second Chechen War’, and independent investigations into the bombings — which some claim were also the end result of a FSB plot — blocked at every opportunity by Russian authorities. Said Putin: “There are no people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such crime against their own people… The very allegation is immoral.”
We all have the strength to endure the misfortune of others.
