Russian Major Says He Planned to Kill Yeltsin

A bungling army major confessed Saturday that he had tried to assassinate Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, first using homemade bombs and then a knife, Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency reported.

The major, whose name was not disclosed, decided it was his duty to kill Yeltsin because the Russian president had been fraudulently elected and carried out policies bad for the people, Itar-Tass said.

“I arrived in Moscow on Jan. 1 with the aim of killing Russian President Boris Yeltsin,” the major, who actually never got near Yeltsin and was arrested Wednesday as he lay in wait in a government building, told military interrogators, according to Itar-Tass.

Russian officers have long complained that Yeltsin helped destroy their army and break up the former Soviet Union, but there was no indication that the major belonged to any organized group of disgruntled officers.

Still, word of the attempt--apparently the first of its kind since the 61-year-old Yeltsin was elected in mid-1991--seemed likely to shake up the Kremlin.

The alleged attempt was reminiscent of an incident in November, 1990, when a radical factory worker got off two shots at then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev during Red Square celebrations of the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

According to the semiofficial Itar-Tass, the major came from the Far East city of Khabarovsk, where he made two bombs filled with steel balls.

Arriving in Moscow, he found the house where he believed Yeltsin lived but was stopped by a guard when he tried to get in.

Sleeping in Moscow’s railway stations and wandering the streets, the major somehow let the bombs get wet in the snow and ruined, Itar-Tass said, so he decided to use a knife. He managed to slip into the complex of government buildings on Staraya Ploshchad, or Old Square, and planned to masquerade as a worker or snow sweeper.

But at 7 a.m. Wednesday, just 1 1/2 hours after he got into the complex by climbing a scaffolding and hiding in an attic, he was found by a security guard.