Suicide bomber kills 14 in Russian train station

A female suicide bomber killed at least 14 people and wounded scores more at a railway station in southern Russia.

The blast heightened concern about terrorism ahead of February’s Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for today’s attack in Volgograd, but it came several months after Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov called for new attacks against civilian targets in Russia, including the Sochi Games.

Volgograd, 550 miles south of Moscow, lies north-east of Sochi, a Black Sea resort flanked by the North Caucasus Mountains.

Suicide bombings and other attacks linked to Islamic rebels roaming the North Caucasus have rocked Russia for years. The government has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers, police and other security personnel to protect the Olympics, President Vladimir Putin’s pet project, and the organisers have pledged to make the Sochi Games the “safest Olympics in history”.

Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for the nation’s top investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, said the suicide bomber detonated her explosives in front of a metal detector.

He put the death toll at 14, while Volgograd’s regional governor, Sergei Bozhenov, said 15 died.

Russia’s Health Ministry said about 50 people were injured.

In October, a female suicide bomber blew herself up on a city bus in Volgograd, killing six people and injuring about 30. Officials said the attacker came from the province of Dagestan, which has become the centre of an Islamist insurgency that has spread across the region after two separatist wars in Chechnya.

Russian state television reported that today’s explosion occurred at the security gate at the station’s entrance. The Interior Ministry said that one police officer died in the explosion and three others were wounded.

Images caught by a security camera facing the station, broadcast by Rossiya 24 television, showed the moment of explosion: a bright orange flash inside the station behind the main gate followed by plumes of smoke.

“We heard a loud bang from behind, saw a bright flash and fell on the floor,” local resident Svetlana Demchenko, who witnessed the explosion, was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Numerous ambulances were parked outside the station, and several motionless bodies were placed on the pavement.

On Friday, three people were killed when a car rigged with explosives blew up on a street in Pyatigorsk, the center of a federal administrative district intended to stabilize the North Caucasus region.

Russia in past years has seen a series of terror attacks on buses, trains and airplanes, some carried out by suicide bombers.

Umarov, who had claimed responsibility for the 2010 and 2011 bombings, ordered a halt to attacks on civilian targets during the mass street protests against President Vladimir Putin in the winter of 2011-12. He reversed that order in July, urging his men to “do their utmost to derail” the Sochi Olympics which he described as “satanic dances on the bones of our ancestors”.