Russians Tend Blast Victims, Hunt for Suspects

Hospital medics fought Saturday to save the wounded survivors of a bombing in southern Russia, while politicians warned against a new outburst of ethnic violence in the tense northern Caucasus region.

Police searched for a man and woman they suspect planted the bomb in the central market of the capital of the republic of North Ossetia on Friday. The blast killed at least 51 people and severely wounded 104, said a duty officer at the local Interior Ministry office.

Addressing an emergency session of the North Ossetian regional parliament in Vladikavkaz, Russian Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin said the bombing was an “act of sabotage aimed at destabilizing the situation in the North Caucasus and throughout Russia, at instigating a clash between the peoples.”

Investigators from the Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service--the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB--said nothing Saturday about the leads they were following. NTV television said investigators had learned that the bomb was planted by a man and a woman in a sack of potatoes that they left in a section of the market crowded with people lined up for vegetables.

Composite sketches of the two suspects were broadcast on television, and a nationwide search was launched. Meanwhile, the borders separating North Ossetia from other Caucasus regions were closed Saturday.

Vladikavkaz, a city 940 miles southeast of Moscow, was quiet, with many streets blocked off by police to provide security to the visiting investigators. Coffin lids were propped up against many apartment buildings, signifying that one or more of their residents had perished in the bombing.

The blast was the worst violence to hit the small southern republic since a 1992 war with ethnic Ingush in which hundreds were killed. That conflict has not been resolved, and it occasionally flares in house bombings and clashes between Ossetians and ethnic Ingush living in the republic.

But police were also looking farther afield for the culprits. Much of the violence that has plagued the Caucasus is blamed on criminals in Chechnya, where lawlessness has reigned since a 1994-96 war of independence against Russia.

The Federal Security Service put the death toll at 63 and said that 39 of those killed had been identified. Casualty figures varied between agencies in part because many of the bodies were blown to pieces.