Putin vows retribution after Chechan president's death

Russian president Vladimir Putin has vowed retribution after an explosion ripped through a stadium in the Chechnya’s capital during a Victory Day parade, killing its president Akhmad Kadyrov.

Kadyrov was the Kremlin’s right-hand man for efforts to restore stability to the war-torn region.

Grozny’s emergency medical centre said 24 people were killed and 46 wounded in yesterday’s atrocity.

However, President Putin’s representative in the southern Russian district, Vladimir Yakovlev, said six people had been killed in the blast, the Interfax news agency reported. He said 53 people had been wounded.

The bombing harshly underlined the difficulties Russia faces in controlling the separatist region’s violence despite a massive troop presence, and was expected to set off a new round of killing between Kadyrov’s camp and his enemies who had long pledged to eliminate him.

The explosive was believed to be a landmine, said Sergei Kozhemyaka, a spokesman for the southern Russian branch of the emergency situations Ministry. NTV television quoted an investigator as saying it had been made out of a 152mm artillery shell and detonated with a wire or timer.

It was planted under the seats where Kadyrov and other dignitaries were watching the ceremonies marking the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War. The ITAR-Tass news agency reported that the mine was planted under the concrete floor of the VIP podium, and that investigators were trying to identify people who had worked on the three-month renovation of the stadium, which was completed just before the Victory Day holiday.

Khusein Isayev, head of Chechnya’s State Council, was killed in the blast, Interfax reported, citing Yakovlev. Eli Isayev, the region’s finance minister, was also among the dead, Russian news reports said.

Reuters news agency said one of the dead was its photographer Adlan Khasanov, 33.

“He was a fine journalist working with dedication and great courage in often-dangerous conditions,” Reuters editor-in-chief Geert Linnebank said.

A top Russian commander, Col-Gen Valery Baranov, initially was reported killed, but officials later said he was in a critical condition, with one leg amputated. Russia’s deputy interior minister, Col Gen Mikhail Pankov, was named commander of troops in Chechnya.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, but suspicion inevitably fell on the rebels, who have made Kadyrov a top target and made several previous attempts on his life.

Police and soldiers launched an extensive search after the blast and detained at least five people, news reports said.

Previous major attacks in Chechnya have been followed by massive operations to find the perpetrators, with troops and security forces sealing off whole neighbourhoods and towns, conducting house-to-house searches and detaining scores of people.

This attack in particular was expected to send waves of fear through Chechnya. Kadyrov’s security service, run by his younger son Ramzan, has been accused of being behind civilian disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Both Kadyrovs denied the accusations.

“Justice will take the upper hand and retribution is inevitable,” Putin said at the conclusion of Moscow’s Victory Day parade on Red Square. Later in the day, meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin called the late Chechen president “a really heroic person”.

The blast collapsed the stadium’s VIP section into a jagged hole and sent up a plume of brown smoke. Panicked people dressed in their Sunday best clambered over the bleachers and shots split the air amid the chaos.

Footage on Russia’s NTV television showed men in uniform dragging away a man resembling Kadyrov, covered in blood.

Russian troops have been fighting Chechen rebels from much of the last decade, with the latest war beginning in September 1999.

Kadyrov, a Muslim imam, was a rebel commander during the separatists’ 1994-96 war that ended with Russian forces withdrawing. However, he became disenchanted during the period of Chechnya’s de facto independence, complaining of the growing influence of the Wahhabi sect of Islam in the republic.

He broke with Aslan Maskhadov, who had been elected Chechen president in 1997, and in 2000 the Kremlin appointed him the republic’s top civilian administrator. He was elected president last October in a vote widely criticised as fraudulent.

Chechen prime minister Sergei Abramov would become the republic’s acting president, the Kremlin said.