MOSCOW, October 22 (RIA Novosti) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that the trademark of the terrorists responsible for Monday’s fatal bus bombing was all too familiar to Russians.
“We know well the hallmark of these people, these criminals, terrorists, at whose hands many people in our country have already died, including representatives of the Islamic clergy,” Putin said at an event dedicated to the 225th anniversary of the founding of the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia.
The Russian president announced a minute’s silence at the event in honor of the victims of the tragedy.
Investigators believe that the explosion on a bus in the southern city of Volgograd on Monday afternoon that killed six people and injured about 30 others was set off by a female suicide bomber, whom authorities have identified as 30-year-old Naida Asiyalova. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
According to an image of the alleged bomber’s passport released by police, Asiyalova was from Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan – an epicenter of Russia’s Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus, where attacks on security forces, police and civilians occur regularly, generated by ethnic, religious and political rivalries, as well as poverty and corruption.
The insurgency fueled a series of bloody post-Soviet separatist wars in the neighboring republic of Chechnya in the 1990s, and militant groups fighting for an independent Islamic state in the Caucasus have claimed responsibility for a series of terrorist attacks – often carried out by female suicide bombers – on transport and other public places around Russia in the past two decades.
