Leading Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev said on Monday that separatist guerrillas under his command carried out the two suicide attacks that killed 78 people in the breakaway Russian republic last week.
”Our martyrs’ two sabotage attacks are only a small part of the operations we have planned for this year,” Basayev said in a statement issued under his nom de guerre Abdallah Shamil Abu-Idris, on the rebel Kavkaz Centre website.
Basayev said his brigade ”carried out two successful sabotage operations against the Russian occupiers and their stooges ‒ the Chechen national traitors”.
Last Monday, suicide bombers drove a truck packed with a ton of explosives into a government building in the northern village of Znamenskoye. The death toll in that attack rose to 60 at the weekend after an 11-year-boy died from his wounds. On Wednesday, at least 18 people were killed when a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a crowded Muslim religious event organised by the pro-Kremlin Unity Russia party in Iliskhan-Yurt.
Basayev has claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest attacks in the nearly four-year-old war in Chechnya, including the hostage-taking at a Moscow theatre that left 119 civilians and 41 rebels dead in October.- Sapa-AFP