Blast Kills 35 at Russian Holiday Parade

MOSCOW -- Russia’s most emotional holiday--traditionally known as the day celebrated through tears--was spoiled Thursday when a bomb blast in the southern city of Kaspiysk killed 35 people, including 12 children, and left 130 wounded, many fighting for their lives.

The explosion, which authorities immediately labeled a terrorist attack, shocked the nation on Victory Day, when patriotism and joy over the defeat of the Nazis in World War II mingle with sorrow over the war dead.

There was outrage as well as sorrow over the explosion on Lenin Street, where soldiers, children and a military band were setting out on a parade march and many veterans were gathered.

The remote-controlled mine, planted near the roadside, was directed to cause maximum casualties. Shrapnel sprayed at street level in an arc as people marched by.

Russia’s NTV television aired film of the immediate aftermath: scattered bodies of soldiers and children, and a man carrying an unconscious boy, whose head was covered in blood, to an ambulance.

Lyudmila Davydova, 50, a teacher who lives on Lenin Street near where the mine exploded, saw the aftermath from her balcony.

“It was the most horrific picture in my life,” she said in a phone interview. “People were lying all over the street in a bloody pile of bodies--soldiers, children, old people.

“Some people were lying still. Some were trying to get up and found that they didn’t have one or two legs, so they fell back again. Everyone was crying and screaming,” she said.

Davydova said a student from her college, obliged to attend the parade, had his leg torn off.

Sergei Rasulov, a journalist from the Novoye Delo newspaper in the nearby city of Makhachkala, arrived an hour after the blast and saw children’s running shoes and musical instruments lying around, a tree ripped out of the ground and streams of blood. He counted 17 shrapnel holes in one person’s boot.

There was no claim of responsibility, but Russian President Vladimir V. Putin blamed “bandits”--the term Russian authorities use for Chechen separatists. Regional prosecutors also blamed Islamic militants.

Kaspiysk is in the republic of Dagestan, east of Chechnya, where separatist rebels are resisting Russian forces. There have been many fatal blasts in southern cities in recent years linked to the Chechen conflict.

The attack’s timing, on a military holiday, and target, a military parade, also seemed to suggest a Chechen link. It came two weeks after the news that Russian forces had assassinated Khattab, an Arab-born Chechen warlord who was one of a few top rebel figures. The slaying was a big setback for the separatist cause; Khattab was considered the main intermediary for Arab funds flowing to Chechnya.

Thursday’s explosion came at 9:55 a.m. as Putin and top military officials had assembled in Moscow’s Red Square for a Victory Day parade at 10 a.m.

Coming on the holiday when Russians celebrate what they see as the Soviet Union’s defeat of the Nazis, Thursday’s blast was calculated to cause maximum shock.

“Even on a day when we are celebrating victory and commemorating those killed in the war, even on this day, bandits kill peaceful civilians, including children, coldbloodedly and purposefully,” Putin said in a tough speech at a Kremlin Victory Day function.

As a garrison town, Kaspiysk has been targeted before: In 1996, a bombing at an apartment building occupied by border guards and their families killed 68.

At the Kremlin reception, Putin called for a minute’s silence to commemorate the victims of Thursday’s blast, and he said terrorism was as dangerous, inhuman and bloody as Nazism.

“Today’s crime was perpetrated by scumbags who hold nothing sacred. But we have the right to treat them just like Nazis, whose sole purpose is to bring death, sow fear and kill,” he said.

Putin called an emergency meeting of top security ministers and ordered the head of the Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, to oversee the investigation. Security in Moscow was tightened.

Davydova’s daughter Anastasia, 21, a student, was watching the parade from her balcony when the blast occurred.

“Broken glass and smoke was all around me pouring into the room. The balcony shook under me, and I thought for a moment that the house was hit with a rocket or a bomb and was falling down,” she said. “I am so scared. I think I will have this fear forever now. I want to run away from here and never come back.”

Valery Gergiyev, director of the Mariinsky State Academic Theater who was in Moscow to perform for war veterans, voiced the feelings of many Russians, saying nothing could justify terrorist acts such as this.

“Under no circumstance, in no time, under no regime, under the banner of no religion can there be a justification for what has been done,” he said. “This is the dark, macabre side of reality that all of mankind faces today.”

Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.