Suicide Bomber Kills 9 in Moscow

A female suicide bomber wearing an explosive device stuffed with metal bolts killed at least nine people near a Moscow subway station Tuesday evening in a blast that also injured at least 51, authorities said.

The woman was heading toward the station but two police officers were on duty at the entrance, Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov told reporters at the scene. “She was frightened, turned around and decided to destroy herself in the thick of a crowd,” he said.

The explosion took place shortly after 8 p.m. near a small parking area between the station and a crowded shopping center. More than an hour after the blast, which destroyed two parked cars and shattered the station’s windows, bodies covered with blankets still lay scattered in pools of blood on the pavement.

“Some of [the victims], being in a state of agony, managed to run a certain distance upon having received lethal wounds,” Luzhkov said.

The bombing, near the Rizhskaya station, triggered a massive traffic jam on the north side of central Moscow that delayed ambulances carrying the wounded for as long as two hours, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported. Seven victims and the bomber died at the scene, and two victims died in ambulances, authorities said.

The blast came one week after two Russian airliners that took off from Moscow crashed nearly simultaneously, killing all 90 people on board, in what authorities say were apparent attacks by terrorists using explosives.

They say two Chechen women are the prime suspects in the crashes, which occurred just days before Sunday’s election to replace Kremlin-backed Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in a bombing in May.

In a statement posted on an Islamist website Tuesday evening, a little-known group calling itself the Islambouli Brigade, which had claimed responsibility for the plane crashes, swiftly claimed responsibility for the attack in Moscow, Reuters reported from Dubai. The statement described the attack as a “heroic operation” in support of Chechen Muslims.

Some details in the group’s statement about the plane crashes, however, did not appear to match investigators’ initial findings.

It was impossible to determine the authenticity and veracity of either statement. Still, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, in comments Tuesday before the Moscow bombing, suggested a link between the crashes and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, apparently based on the Islambouli Brigade’s claim.

“It is a fact that explosions occurred aboard two Russian airliners, and if a terrorist organization linked to Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for this, it confirms the link between specific forces in Chechnya and international terrorism,” Putin said at a news conference in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi after talks there with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac.

The two Chechen women suspected in the jet crashes lived together in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s war-torn republic of Chechnya, the newspaper Izvestia reported Monday.

The women -- Amanta Nagayeva, whose family called her Amnat, and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova -- were seen two days before the crashes on a bus in Khasavyurt, about 1,000 miles southeast of Moscow, in the company of two other women who were their roommates, the newspaper said. Investigators had expressed concern that those women might be in Moscow with the intent to carry out more terrorist attacks, the newspaper said.

The presumption in the Russian media early today that one of the two roommates had been the Moscow suicide bomber was so strong that the Federal Security Service, or FSB, took the unusual step of releasing a statement stressing that the bomber had not yet been identified. FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko called the reports “pure invention,” Itar-Tass reported.

Chechens exercised self-rule in their Caucasus republic after defeating Russian troops in a 1994-96 war. Russian forces returned in 1999 and have fought guerrillas since.

Chechen women who have lost brothers, sons, husbands or fathers in the war against Russian troops are believed to have carried out a number of suicide attacks in Russia in recent years.

In July 2003, two female suicide bombers believed to be Chechens killed 14 people when they blew themselves up at the entrance to an open-air rock festival in Moscow.

In December, a female bomber killed six people near the Kremlin.

And an apparent suicide bomber set off an explosion in the Moscow subway in February that killed 39 people.

Mayor Luzhkov said Tuesday’s attack was carried out with an explosive device that was unusually powerful for a suicide bomber, the equivalent of about 2 pounds of TNT.

“The explosive device was stuffed with various metal bolts and other metal items.... This is an untraditional size even for suicide bombers,” he said. “They usually use smaller charges. But this time, they apparently wanted to attain the maximum killing effect.”

The Russian Business Consulting website carried photographs of the bombing scene showing the remains of a person who had been blown apart above the waist.

It was not clear whether it was the bomber.

Luzhkov said four children were among the wounded.

Two cars were destroyed in the blast, and initial reports said the explosion had come from a car bomb.

The mayor said Moscow’s annual end-of-summer festival set for Sunday, when various events take place in parks, would be held as scheduled.

“Extra security measures will be introduced,” he said.

Maxim Pozdnyakov, 15, who was in his apartment about 500 yards away when the bomb went off, said the blast was so powerful that he thought at first that the explosion was in his own building.

Pozdnyakov said he does not worry about being hurt in a terrorist bombing in Moscow but that he knows other people who do, and have stopped taking the subway for that reason.

Said his friend Dmitry Kashirin, 16: “I can’t get by without taking the subway. But I think people with a more vulnerable psyche will stop taking the subway and stop going to public places, because this is simply unbearable.”