Chechen militant claims Moscow subway attacks

April 1, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

MAKHACHKALA, Russia

A Chechen militant claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks on the Moscow subway in an Internet message posted Wednesday, hours after two more suicide bombers struck southern Russia in brazen defiance of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Doku Umarov, who leads Islamic militants in Chechnya and other regions in Russia’s North Caucasus, said in a video posted on a pro-rebel Web site that Monday’s twin suicide attacks were revenge for the killing of civilians by Russian security forces.

Umarov’s statement appeared after Putin vowed to “drag out of the sewer” the terrorists who plotted the subway bombings, which killed 39 people and wounded scores of commuters during the morning rush hour.

Wednesday’s suicide bombings killed 12 people in Dagestan, a volatile southern province east of Chechnya. Putin said they could have been planned by the same group behind the Moscow bombings.

“I don’t rule out that this is one and the same gang,” he said at a televised Cabinet meeting. President Dmitry Medvedev later called the attacks “links of the same chain.”

The suicide bombings in Moscow were the first in the capital in six years and served as a wake-up call for many Russians, who had come to feel insulated from the violence raging in the country’s predominantly Muslim southern corner.

There was no way to substantiate Umarov’s claim, and officials at Russian law-enforcement agencies refused to comment on Umarov’s claim.

In Wednesday’s violence, a suicide bomber in a car detonated explosives when police tried to stop it in the town of Kizlyar near Dagestan’s border with Chechnya, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said.

As investigators and residents gathered, a second bomber wearing a police uniform approached and set off explosives, killing Kizlyar’s police chief among others, Nurgaliyev said.