Advertisement

Rescue efforts slow at blast site

GROZNY, Russia, Dec. 29 (UPI) -- Medical personnel were winding down their rescue efforts at the burned out government building in the Chechen capital Sunday, having apparently recovered all the survivors as well as the victims of Friday's bombing.

The death toll continued to fluctuate as the Itar-Tass news agency Sunday reported from 41 to 55 dead but other sources suggested the death toll was at least in the 60s.

Advertisement

The count of fatalities was complicated by the practice of relatives of removing bodies almost immediately for funerals before sunset the next day, as is the custom in the region.

About 30 of the more than 150 injured were flown to hospitals in Moscow Saturday. Recovery efforts were suspended at nightfall Saturday.

Three men, outfitted in Russian military uniforms, drove a KaMAZ three-axle transport truck and a UAZ off-road vehicle Friday through triple defense perimeters of the Chechen government offices and exploded them at the building entrance, said acting Chechen Interior Minister Akhmed Dakayev, Tass reported Saturday.

Advertisement

Grozny's city hospital No. 9 released the names of the 153 people killed or injured, including the names of the chief of Chechnya's Security Council and three deputy prime ministers.

Meanwhile, the Chechen and Russian governments Saturday received messages of condolence from British, Japanese, German and Finnish foreign leaders, as well as from the heads of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and the Russian constituent republic of Tatarstan.

"Such acts cannot advance any cause and only adds to the suffering of a region that has endured so much already," wrote U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a letter of condolence to Russia and the victims' families.

The International Red Cross told Tass it has maintained permanent contact with local hospitals' medical personnel, providing medicine and dressing materials and examining over 50 survivors.

An aircraft of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry airlifted about 70 Moscow paramedics with 13 tons of equipment to Mozdok Saturday morning to help victims of the blasts and to staff a field hospital brought to the region.

Russian military leadership in the North Caucasus pointed to the Chechen militants' leader Aslan Maskhadov and Arab mercenary Abu-Tarik as masterminds of the truck bomb blast. Maskhadov is the elected separatist president of Chechnya but is often portrayed by Moscow as the leader of terrorists.

Advertisement

A spokesman for the regional counter-terrorist operation coordination center, Col. Ilya Shabalkin, said the "law enforcement received intelligence information lately about a meeting between (Chechen guerilla leaders) Abu al-Walid and Shamil Basayev, where the objective was to stage major terrorist attacks in Grozny and Chechnya's district centers."

As a result of counter-measures the mercenary Abu-Tarik was killed in the village of Staryie Atagi, Shabalkin said, "but the terrorist attack failed to be prevented," he said.

"The purpose of the terrorist attack was to destabilize the situation in Chechnya and upset the referendum on Chechnya's constitution and on the presidential and parliamentary election laws in Chechnya," Shabalkin said, Tass reported.

Investigation of the blast site, including the examination of bodies and questioning of survivors, was expected to wrap up later Saturday, Russian Deputy Prosecutor-General Sergei Fridinsky told journalists in a morning news briefing. The examination was reportedly being conducted by a team of about 30 investigators from the Chechen Prosecutor's Office, the local department of the Russian security service FSB, and from the Chechen and Russian interior ministries.

Chechen militants on Friday had claimed responsibility for the two suicide bombs that leveled offices of Chechnya's pro-Moscow government.

In a telephone call to the Chechen news agency Kavkaz, a spokesman for the militants said "martyrs" drove the two vehicles, packed with an estimated 1 ton of explosives, and rammed them through the building's three-ring defense perimeter to its entrance, according to the Italian daily newspaper La Rupubblica.

Advertisement

The blasts tore off the front of the building, turned it into a burning frame and left a crater more than 10 meters (30 feet) wide and nearly 6 meters (20 feet) deep in front.

The blast was the most devastating strike attributed to Chechen rebels in their campaign to break from Russia since a group took hundreds of theatergoers hostage in Moscow in late October. More than 120 people died in that incident, almost all from the effects of the gas Russian special forces used to incapacitate the militants and re-take the theater.

Latest Headlines