Bomb Injures 3 Workers in Moscow Metro

A small bomb hidden in a purse and left in an underground passage of the Moscow Metro subway system exploded Thursday, injuring three transportation workers and prompting police to label the incident a “terrorist act.”

The blast in the Tretyakovskaya Metro station occurred just before 10 a.m. and likely would have inflicted more injuries on any other day. New Year’s Day is Russia’s biggest holiday, and most Muscovites were still sleeping off the previous night’s celebrations.

The Tretyakovskaya station is the nearest to the Tretyakov Gallery, a popular art museum that normally attracts thousands of visitors on weekends and holidays. The Moscow subway system carries as many as 9 million passengers on a normal day.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, as was the case in three transportation explosions in mid-1996 that killed four passengers and injured dozens more. Those earlier attacks were blamed on separatists who were at war with Russian forces in the southern republic of Chechnya at the time.

Police gave no indication who might be suspected in the latest bombing. A peace treaty ending the Chechen conflict was signed in May.

Just before Thursday’s blast, a Metro employee found the purse and summoned a bomb disposal squad after discovering that it contained wires and what appeared to be a timing device. An Interior Ministry spokesman told Russian news agencies that the purse had been moved to a Metro workers’ lounge and exploded 10 minutes later, before the bomb squad arrived. It was not clear why employees were still in the vicinity of the device at the time of the explosion.

Two of the three women injured were released after treatment for injuries from flying glass shards. The third, a cleaning woman, suffered more serious head and leg wounds and was hospitalized, the Interfax news agency reported.

Police patrols were stepped up throughout the 160-station Metro system after the bombing, which left a sooty residue but otherwise inflicted no structural damage.