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Plenty More Where I combined a Reuters/Yahoo photo w/ the AP/Washington Post slop below. No victim photos for the Post/AP slop. |
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Large Explosion in Chechen Capital
By Sergei Venyavsky MOSCOW - A truck bomb exploded Friday near a government compound in the Chechen capital, Grozny, wounding at least 36 people, a Chechen official said. The blast went off about 70 yards from a building that houses the police department for fighting organized crime in Chechnya, said Akhmed Dzheirkhanov, deputy chief of the Emergency Situations Ministry branch for the republic. Chechen Prime Minister Anatoly Popov initially said a woman was killed in the explosion but later said there were no deaths and several injuries. Dzeirkhanov said 36 people were hurt, four of them hospitalized. A Chechen Justice Ministry official, Vadish Tepkayev, said the blast killed eight people. There was no way to reconcile the conflicting casualty counts. Dzheirkhanov had also said earlier that another blast occurred nearby but later said there was just one explosion. The explosion carved out a crater several feet wide, Dzheirkhanov said. Another Chechen emergency ministry official, Ruslan Khadzhiyev, said the truck was carrying the equivalent of 1.6 tons of TNT. TVS television showed footage of a man, cradling an injured arm, running for help on a street strewn with metal fragments reportedly from a large Kamaz truck. Police and troops came streaming into the street, moving quickly toward the smoke-covered scene of the blast. The explosions came the day before the Chechen State Council, the republic's temporary legislature, was to have met for its first session in a Grozny building hastily built to replace the government headquarters destroyed in a December car bombing. That attack killed at least 70 people. Earlier this month, a female bomber blew up a bus carrying workers from a Russian air base near Chechnya, killing herself and at least 14 people. Two other suicide bombings in a three-day period inside Chechnya last month killed at least 78 people. The rebel attacks have undercut the Kremlin's efforts to portray the situation in the war-shattered region as stabilizing. The Russian parliament last month approved a partial amnesty in hopes of encouraging rebels to abandon their fight. Rebels forced Russian troops out of Chechnya after a 1994-96 war, leaving the republic de facto independent. Russian troops rolled back in fall 1999 after rebels raided a neighboring Russian region and after a series of apartment explosions blamed on rebels. © 2003 The Associated Press |
