A female suicide bomber killed 16 people and injured dozens more at the main entrance of a railway station in Russia yesterday. It was the second deadly attack in the space of three days in Volgograd and raises fears of a terror campaign before and during the Winter Olympics which the country is due to host in 39 days.
The bomber - named as 26-year-old Oksana Aslanova - detonated her explosives in front of a metal detector as passengers made their way to and from trains.
TV footage showed a massive orange fireball filling the hall and corridors of the imposing Stalinist building, with smoke and dust billowing out through shattered windows. Witness Alexander Koblyakov said: ‘People were lying on the ground, screaming and asking for help. I helped carry out a police officer whose head and face were covered in blood. He couldn’t speak.’
Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, said: ‘A suicide bomber who was approaching a metal detector saw a law enforcement official and, after growing nervous, set off an explosive device.’
A policeman who ‘spotted the suspicious woman’ was last night hailed as a hero for saving ‘hundreds of lives’. According to reports the officer, Dmitry Makovkin, 29, rushed towards her seconds before the blast and was killed.
More than 40 people were reported as injured and the death toll could rise, according to Russian officials.
The attacker was named as Aslanova, who had twice married separatist Muslim gang leaders from the troubled Caucasus region, sources said.
She had been on Russia’s wanted list for 18 months before the attack which used 16lb of TNT, the deadliest in Russia for three years. The bomb was the equivalent to at least 10kg of TNT, said to Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin, and was stuffed with metal shrapnel.
President Vladimir Putin has reportedly instructed special flights to be laid on to airlift the injured to Moscow clinics if necessary. Metal detectors have been mandatory in railway stations and airports throughout Russia since a suicide bomber killed 37 people at Domodedovo airport in 2011.
Footage from a CCTV camera facing the station showed the moment the bomb went off, with a bright orange flash emerging from inside the station followed by billowing smoke.
'Someone tried to get inside the train station but was not allowed in,' an unidentified law enforcement official told Vysota 102, a local news agency. 'After that an explosion went off.' Among the dead was a police officer checking people entering the train station and a child, The Moscow Times reports. Local media reports claim taxi drivers queuing for customers outside the station were the first respondents to the emergency.
Volgograd mayor, Irina Guseva said the drivers were able to save lives by taking injured victims to hospital before ambulances arrived at the scene. The attack comes months after Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov called for new attacks against civilian targets in Russia, including the 2014 Games which will take place in Sochi.
In October, a female suicide bomber blew herself up on a bus in the city where today's attack took place, killing six people and injuring about 30. Officials said at the time the attacker came from the province of Dagestan, the center of an Islamist insurgency that has spread across the region after two separatist wars in Chechnya.
On Friday a car rigged with explosives blew up on a street in Pyatigorsk in the North Caucasus Mountains.
Credits: DailyMail
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