Russia braces for new wave of terror attacks in metropolitan areas
their attacks to the North Caucasus area in recent years but the bombing of a passenger train between Moscow and St. Petersburg last November that left dozens dead may have been a sign they were about to change tactics.
As world leaders from President Barack Obama to Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the attack unreservedly, Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, vowed vengeance. “A crime that is terrible in its consequences and heinous in its manner has been committed,” he said. “The terrorists will be destroyed.”
Such attacks were common in the Russian capital in the early part of this decade but fizzled out in 2004 around the time of the Beslan school siege, an atrocity which triggered global condemnation of the Islamist rebel movement which says it is fighting to rid Russia’s southern flank of what it calls Russian occupiers.
The Beslan atrocity
The Beslan atrocity began when a group of armed Ingush and Chechen terrorists took more than 1,100 people, including 777 children, hostage on 1 September 2004, at School Number One (SNO) in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, an autonomous republic in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation. The hostage taking was carried out by a group sent by the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. On the third day of the siege, Russian special forces stormed the building. The Islamist terrorists — tossing hand grenades into groups of huddled children, using machine guns, and detonating pre-positioned explosives placed in crowded class rooms — managed to kill 334 hostages, including 186 children, before being subdued. Hundreds more were injured and many were reported missing.
Basayev, the mastermind of the massacre of the Beslan children, was hunted down by the FSB, the Russian security force. FSB agents killed him on 10 July 2006 in the village of Ekazhevo, in Ingushetia, a republic bordering Chechnya. Basayev was riding in one of the cars escorting a truck filled with explosives on its way to an attack against Russian forces. A Russian “mole” in Basayev’s force had planted a remote-controlled triggering mechanism in the explosives on the truck. When surveillance cameras in a Russian UAV hovering over the convoy spotted Basayev’s car near the truck, FSB agents remotely activated the detonator, causing the explosives on the truck to explode, killing Besayev and three of his comrades.