It was just after 4.30pm and groups of happy Russians, some clutching bunches of flowers, were thronging outside the Aziya café at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.
The concourse outside the international arrivals hall was busy. Taxi drivers touted for business. Expectant people craned their necks to spot relatives and friends emerging with their trolleys from the baggage reclaim area.
Artyom Zhilenkov (30) was waiting for a business colleague to fly in when the explosion hit. “There was a massive boom and then a wave of heat and pressure that swept along the floor, bent my legs and flung me aside,” he told the Guardian.
Unhurt, Zhilenkov got to his feet to find his coat spattered with the blood and flesh of others. “I was looking towards a dark-skinned man when it happened. I think it was the suitcase standing next to him that exploded.”
Unconfirmed reports said that investigators had found among the carnage the head of a 30 to 35-year-old man who is thought to have been the suicide bomber. They estimate he detonated the equivalent of 7kg of TNT.
Some witnesses told Russian TV’s Vesti news programme that before detonating the explosives the bomber shouted: “I’ll kill you all!” The result was horror and chaos. At least 35 people died and 168 were injured. “There were shouts and screams and those who could move picked themselves up and ran away,” said Zhilenkov.
Explosion
“Then I returned and a few of us loaded the injured on to luggage trolleys and took them to the airport’s medical station. I carried a man who had lost a leg and then a woman with wounded legs. It was horrifying. I took a third victim but then I realised he was dead.”
A man called Viktor, who had just emerged from the building when the blast hit, told reporters: “There was an explosion, a bang. Then I saw a policeman running out and shouting. He was covered in blood and lumps of flesh. He was just crying, ‘I survived, I survived!'”
The precise circumstances of the explosion are still unclear but all the signs are that Islamist militants in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus region have brought their fight back to Moscow.
Their attack on the city’s busiest and most modern airport, with dozens of daily flights to Brussels, London, Berlin, the United States and numerous other destinations, deals a crushing blow to Kremlin promises to ensure security after a similar attack in the capital less than a year ago.
Business people in Moscow were exchanging worried text messages and calls this week because many colleagues were due to fly out of Domodedovo to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Russia is due to laud its stability.
President Dmitry Medvedev cancelled his departure for the forum and ordered increased security at all airports. He promised to track down the “terrorists”. At least five foreigners, including two Britons and visitors from Italy, France and Slovakia, were said to be among the dead.
The mighty blast
Video footage taken on a mobile phone moments after the blast showed dazed survivors reeling through the smoke-filled hall. One figure was slumped against a bollard. A pile of twisted corpses lay on the floor.
Sergei Amelkin (28) had just flown in from Siberia. “There was a terrible smell,” he said. “We thought it was a fire and we fled outside. Then there were scores of emergency vehicles arriving and we saw the injured being rushed out on trolleys.”
Mark Green, who had just arrived on a British Airways flight, told BBC News: “As we were picking up the bags to put them into the back of the car, there was an almighty explosion. It reverberated through our bodies. There was a pause of 30 seconds before people started running out of the terminal, some of whom were injured, some of whom were covered in blood or some kind of black product. People were obviously in a state of shock and panic.”
Monday’s scenes were painfully reminiscent of those in March last year when suicide bombers struck two Moscow metro stations, killing 40 people and injuring more than 100.
Doku Umarov, the Chechen leader of the Islamist coalition known as the Caucasus Emirate, later claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Full-scale fighting between separatists and federal forces ended in Chechnya in 2001, but conflict has since spilled out into neighbouring Muslim republics, where poverty, police persecution and the lure of charismatic preachers push young men to join radical fighters aiming to establish an Islamic caliphate.
A coalition of several hundred militants, living in safe houses and forest hideouts, now stretches across the North Caucasus, a sweep of mountain country between the Black Sea and the Caspian, about 1600km south of Moscow.
Bombings, assassinations and abductions are common in the region, where equally ruthless state security forces are pitted against the extremists. Several of the militants’ leaders have been killed or captured in the past year, but Umarov — despite a recent split in his ranks — has proved himself capable of striking deep into the Russian heartland. Suspicion now will fall on the Riyadus-Salikhin suicide battalion, a training unit for “martyrs” revived by Umarov in 2009.
Before the metro bombing last year there had been no serious terrorist attacks in Moscow since 2004, when bombs were detonated on two aeroplanes flying out of Domodedovo, killing 89 people. The Beslan school siege, in which more than 330 people died in the largely Christian republic of North Ossetia, happened the same year.
The Kremlin recently changed tack with its strategy in the North Caucasus, appointing Alexander Khloponin, a successful former businessman, as presidential envoy in the region to improve its economy as a way of decreasing the pool of disaffected youths who join the militants. So far, the tactic has shown few results. Domodedovo remained open, although some flights were delayed. — Guardian News & Media 2011