Russia: Up to 35 dead in lorry-bomb suicide attack

A suicide attacker rammed a truck packed with explosives through the gates of a Russian military hospital near Chechnya, destroying the building and killing at least 27 people, authorities said. One official put the death toll at 35.

Yesterday’s blast demolished the four-storey red brick hospital in the city of Mozdok in Russia’s North Ossetia region, the region’s emergency situations minister Boris Dzgoyev said. He said that at the moment of the explosion, there were 98 patients and 21 employees inside the building, which collapsed like a house of cards.

At least 27 people were killed and 76 injured, with about 15 others were feared trapped beneath the rubble early today, Dzgoyev said. Russian deputy prosecutor general Sergei Fridinsky said earlier that 35 bodies had been pulled from the ruins, according to the Interfax news agency.

Many of the injured were soldiers recovering from wounds suffered in Chechnya, where Russia has been fighting its second war against rebels in a decade for nearly four years.

Maj Gen Nikolai Lityuk, deputy chief of the emergency ministry’s southern Russia branch, said a Kamaz truck broke through the hospital gates, drove past a group of tents, pulled up at the reception office and exploded, leaving a crater 26ft across and 10ft deep.

“We were the first to arrive. Near the checkpoint of the hospital there were charred corpses,” a medical assistant from Mozdok’s central hospital, Galina, said on Rossiya television. “Tents that were put up near the main building were all gone, there was one wall left from the main building.”

The force of the explosion was equivalent to at least a ton of TNT, Interfax quoted Fridinsky as saying.

A woman who lives 2.5 miles from the hospital told Ekho Moskvy radio that windows broke and plaster fell from walls in her neighbourhood. “I saw a big column of smoke,” said the woman, identified as Valentina.

Lityuk said preliminary information indicated one person was in the truck during the attack, the latest deadly assault aimed at the Russian military in and around Chechnya and another bloody blow to the Kremlin’s efforts to bring order in the region.

A fire broke out after the blast but was put out in about two hours. Emergency workers later picked through the rubble with heavy machinery and sniffer dogs, and the Ministry of Emergency Situations sent a plane with rescuers and medical equipment from Moscow, officials said.

Alina Totykova, deputy head of the main regional hospital in North Ossetia’s capital Vladikavkaz, said there was a serious shortage of medicine, anaesthetics and bandages and a severe shortage of blood, adding that an appeal for people to give blood would be broadcast on local television.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack – the latest in a surge of suicide bombings that have killed more than 100 people in and near Chechnya and in Moscow since May – but Russian officials said they suspected Chechen rebels.

Fridinsky said that as servicemen wounded in Chechnya were being treated at the hospital, “we are inclined to view this crime as an act of revenge” by Chechen fighters, Interfax reported.

Mozdok is the headquarters for Russian forces fighting in Chechnya and has been targeted by attackers before. In June, a female suicide attacker detonated a bomb near a bus carrying soldiers and civilians to work at a military airfield near Mozdok, killing at least 16 people.

In May in Chechnya, a truck-bomb attack similar to today’s blast killed 60 people and a woman blew herself up at a religious ceremony, killing at least 18. Last month, a double suicide bombing at a rock concert in Moscow killed 15 bystanders.

President Vladimir Putin expressed condolences to relatives of the victims and ordered an investigation, the Kremlin said.

In Washington, a spokesman for US president George Bush, Scott McClellan, said the United States condemned the attack and that no cause could justify terrorism.

Russian forces withdrew from Chechnya following a devastating 1994-1996 war that left separatists in charge, but returned in 1999 after Chechnya-based militants invaded a neighbouring region and after the Kremlin also blamed rebels for apartment-building bombings that killed about 300 people.