Explosion Kills 14 in Chechnya

An ambush and explosion killed 14 people and injured 21 others Tuesday in northern Chechnya in what authorities said was a meticulously planned attack that targeted a region previously thought to be firmly under the control of the Russian government.

Eleven law enforcement officers and three youths were killed when a jeep packed with the equivalent of more than 17 pounds of TNT exploded at a busy intersection in the town of Znamenskoye.

“This infernal device was meant to destroy all living creatures, which is precisely what happened,” deputy district administration chief Ibragim Indarbiyev said as he stood near the scene, about a block from the town’s police station.

Authorities said they believed the attack was planned by Chechen insurgent leader Shamil Basayev, who is wanted in connection with a series of deadly attacks on law enforcement officials and civilians across Russia.

“For a long time, it has made no difference to Basayev who dies: an army serviceman, a police officer, an old woman or a child. It is most important to him that blood flows,” said Chechen President Alu Alkhanov, who declared Thursday a day of mourning throughout the republic.

Znamenskoye officer Khesan Dakhayev said police received a call about 1 p.m. that a police jeep had been fired on near the center of town.

When a large team of officers arrived at the scene in a minibus half an hour later, they found the body of a police officer alone in the front passenger seat of the jeep. A large crowd of onlookers had gathered around the vehicle, and when officers pushed them back and opened the door, the bomb exploded.

Authorities speculated that the police officer had been killed as long as several days before the incident, and his body placed in a vehicle packed with explosives as a ruse.

The dead included the head of the criminal investigation department of the district police, Aslanbek Elmurzayev, and the head of the passport department, Khizir Mintsayev, along with an officer of the Federal Security Service.

“The attack was planned in advance. The amount of time between the shooting and the explosion was minimal. They were waiting for the investigative group to arrive [before setting off the bomb],” Chechen Prime Minister Sergei Abramov said in a telephone interview.

The scene in Znamenskoye was chaotic as panicked residents fled the town center and dozens of ambulances raced victims to hospitals in the Chechen capital of Grozny and in the surrounding republics of southern Russia.

One of the dead was a boy who had been riding his bicycle near the bomb scene, they said. The force of the explosion was so strong that only the axles remained of the police vehicle.

Znamenskoye was the scene of one of the worst terrorist bombings in Chechnya’s long-running separatist wars in May 2003, when a massive truck bomb exploded in the town center, killing about 60 people and destroying the regional headquarters of the Federal Security Service.

But the town lies deep within Russian-controlled territory and recently has been considered one of the most stable in Chechnya. The latest attack calls into question Russia’s declarations that the war is nearing an end and its hope of holding peaceful parliamentary elections in Chechnya this year.

Nabi Abdullaev, an analyst with the Moscow-based Center for Eurasian Security Studies, said the attack might also reflect a new willingness on the part of insurgents to accept civilian casualties. Many Chechen civilians killed in attacks have been identified as “collaborators” working with the Moscow-based Chechen government, he said.

“In most attacks, the rebels try to spare civilians. Though there were indiscriminate attacks ... even in those cases the [victims] could be seen as collaborators, and that’s [seen as] a legitimate target,” Abdullaev said.

Although it is early to draw conclusions, Abdullaev said, it may be that the insurgents are “drawing gradually into religiously motivated warfare, in which the distinction between combatants and noncombatants is much less clear than when the rebel movement was motivated by political goals, and thus needed to win the support of the local constituency.”

Special correspondent Mayerbek Nunayev in Znamenskoye and Times staff writer Natasha Yefimova in Moscow contributed to this report.