AFP/Moscow
Russian authorities faced blame yesterday over their failure to prevent a train blast that killed 26 people, rattling nerves and raising the spectre of renewed attacks on the country’s heartland.
Travellers were jittery at Moscow’s Leningradsky station, the departure point of the Nevsky Express luxury train that was derailed by a bomb as it headed to Saint Petersburg on Friday.
Many winced at the recollection that the same train - which is popular with well-off Russians and foreign tourists - had already been the target of a bomb attack in 2007 which injured 60 people.
Newspapers yesterday compared the shock effect of the blast to the Beslan hostage crisis, which ended with the deaths of more than 334 people, mostly children, in 2004.
“This is the most sensational act of terror since Beslan,” the popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote.
Russia had seen a lull in attacks in the country’s main population centres since a spate of suicide bombings in Moscow in 2003 and 2004 attributed to Chechen rebels.
But observers said the threat of such attacks has never subsided and security services should have been better prepared.
Under the headline “The Terror Returns”, daily newspaper Trud observed: “The blast caught the security services completely off guard.”
In a scathing commentary, the Vedomosti daily slammed authorities for not having learned from numerous previous bomb attacks.
There was no claim of responsibility for Friday’s blast, which led prosecutors to launch a terrorism probe.
Islamist and Russian ultranationalist groups are the probable suspects, experts said. |
