Second suicide bomber in Russia’s Volgograd kills 14 on bus

VOLGOGRAD, Russia (Reuters) – A bomb ripped a bus apart in Volgograd yesterday, killing 14 people in the second deadly attack blamed on suicide bombers in the southern Russian city in 24 hours and raising fears of Islamist attacks on the Winter Olympics.

President Vladimir Putin, who has staked his prestige on February’s Sochi Games and dismissed threats from Chechen and other Islamist militants in the nearby North Caucasus, ordered tighter security nationwide after the morning rush-hour blast.

The previous day’s similar attack killed at least 17 in the main rail station of a city that serves as a gateway to the southern wedge of Russian territory bounded by the Black and Caspian Seas and the Caucasus mountains.

Yesterday, the blue and white trolleybus – powered by overhead electric cables – was reduced to a twisted, gutted carcass. Bodies were strewn across the street as Russians prepared to celebrate New Year, the biggest annual holiday.

Windows in nearby apartments were blown out by the blast, which Russia’s foreign ministry condemned as part of a global terrorist campaign.

“For the second day, we are dying. It’s a nightmare,” a woman near the scene told Reuters, her voice trembling as she choked back tears. “What are we supposed to do, just walk now?”

“Identical” shrapnel to that in the rail station indicated that the two bombs were linked, investigators said. “There was smoke and people were lying in the street,” said Olga, who works nearby. “The driver was thrown a long way. She was alive and moaning … Her hands and clothes were bloody.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for either of the two attacks. Investigators said they believed a male suicide bomber was responsible for yesterday’s blast. In Sunday’s attack, the federal Investigative Committee initially described the bomber as a woman from Dagestan, a hub of Islamist militancy on the Caspian, but later said the attacker may have been a man.

Citing unnamed sources, the Interfax news agency said the suspected attacker in Sunday’s blast was an ethnic Russian convert to Islam who had moved to Dagestan and joined militants there early in 2012.

Volgograd was also the scene of an attack in October, when a woman from Dagestan killed seven people in a suicide bus blast.

The violence raises fears of a concerted campaign before the Olympics, which start on February 7 around Sochi, a resort on the Black Sea at the western end of the Caucasus range, 700 km (450 miles) southwest of Volgograd. In an online video posted in July, the Chechen leader of insurgents who want to carve an Islamic state out of the swathe of mainly Muslim provinces south of Volgograd, urged militants to use “maximum force” to prevent the Games from going ahead. “Terrorists in Volgograd aim to terrorize others around the world, making them stay away from the Sochi Olympics,” said Dmitry Trenin, an analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Centre.

North Caucasus militants have also staged attacks in Moscow and other cities, the most recent in the capital being an airport suicide bombing three years ago that killed 37 people.