Sunday, September 5, 2010

A militant Islamist group has claimed responsibility for last weekend’s Russian train bombing, as investigators said the well-planned attack resembled tactics used by Chechen rebels.

The so-called ‘Caucasus Emirate’, an umbrella group uniting various Islamist factions, said in a statement posted on a Chechen rebel web site that it was behind the attack that killed 26 people and injured around 100 others.

“This operation was prepared and executed along with other acts of sabotage, planned from the start of this year and successfully carried out against a set of strategically important sites in Russia, on the orders of Caucasus Emir Dokku Umarov,” the statement said.

Umarov, the self-proclaimed  leader of the Caucasus Emirate, has sought to establish Islamic Sharia rule in Russia’s largely Muslim North Caucasus region.

Friday’s bombing struck the Nevsky Express, an upscale passenger train running from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, popular with well-off Russ-ians, as well as foreign tourists.

Prosecutors have opened a terrorism probe into the train blast, which was the first major attack to hit Russia’s heartland, outside the North Caucasus, since a spate of suicide bombings in Moscow in 2003 and 2004.

The statement said the train “was mainly used by the ruling bureaucrats of Russia”.

At least two government officials were killed in the train bombing, and the chief of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, was injured by a remote-controlled bomb blast when he arrived at the scene the next day.

Bastrykin - whom officials say was not seriously injured -- said that the bomb that injured him resembled explosive booby-traps laid by Chechen rebels in attacks.

Shortly after the train bombing, an obscure Russian ultra-nationalist group calling itself Combat 18 claimed responsibility for the attack, but the claim was dismissed by Russian authorities.