AT least 20 people were killed and more than 100 others wounded on Thursday when a bomb exploded during a military parade in Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan, the local interior ministry said.
The landmine blast in the town of Kaspiysk targeted a bus carrying an army brass band as a column of marines marched to a ceremony marking the 57th anniversary of victory in World War II, a ministry representative said.
The death toll was still rising as emergency services rushed the wounded to hospital in the aftermath of the explosion, which happened at 9:45 am (0545 GMT), he added.
But already, with at least 20 victims, the Victory Day blast ranked as one of the deadliest single terrorist attacks on Russian military targets since Moscow launched its self-styled ”anti-terrorist” operation in Chechnya on October 1, 1999.
The mine was hidden in shrubbery around 300 metres from the town’s main square where a wreath-laying ceremony marking Russia’s Victory Day was about to be held, the emergencies ministry said.
Most of the dead and wounded were marines, but the victims also included war veterans and children who were participating in the parade in Kaspiysk, around 20 kilometres south of the Dagestan capital Makhachkala, Interfax reported.
A 50-metre-long stretch of the town’s Lenin street, where the bomb went off, was stained with blood and strewn with fragments of drums and trumpets and other brass band instruments, according to television pictures from the scene.
Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately called an emergency meeting with senior ministers and dispatched security service (FSB, ex-KGB) chief Nikolai Patrushev to take personal charge of the investigation.
Putin said it was necessary ”in the shortest time to identify, convict and punish the criminals,” RIA Novosti reported.
”That this was a terrorist attack, nobody is in any doubt,” the Russian leader said, adding: ”Such crimes and cruelty cannot but cause emotions. These emotions must not us prevent from carrying out a thorough investigation of this crime,” he added.
Moments earlier, Putin and his colleagues had attended a Victory Day parade in Moscow’s Red Square, where the Kremlin boss warned that 21st-century terrorism was ”just as dangerous as Nazism” had been during World War II.
”The forces of evil and violence reappear again and again in the world. Today they have other names and other habits, but they all also bring death and destruction,” Putin told the military parade of around 5 000 troops.
FSB and military investigators rushed to the scene of the Kaspiysk blast to search for clues about the terror attack which happened as the military column was marching to the town’s cemetery for a wreath-laying ceremony.
Dagestan borders the southern republic of Chechnya, where Russian troops have been fighting a 31-month war against separatist rebels, who had often been linked to terror attacks in neighbouring republics.
The chairman of Dagestan’s state council Magomedali Magomedov, the speaker of Dagestan’s assembly Mukhu Aliyev joined FSB investigators and military personnel at the scene of the blast.
”The bastards who staged this attack will be wiped out,”
Magomedov was quoted as saying by ITAR-TASS. ? Sapa-AFP