Steve Quayle News Alerts

Dec 9, 2003
By STEVEN LEE MYERS The New York Times

MOSCOW - A bomb exploded outside a hotel in the heart of Moscow today, killing at least five people and wounding 13 in what officials described as a terrorist attack only a few hundred feet from the Kremlin and the lower house of parliament.

The explosion, which officials said appeared to be the work of one or two suicide bombers, came only two days Russia's parliamentary elections and only four days after a suicide bombing wrecked a commuter train in southern Russia, killing at least 44.

The bomb exploded just before 11:00 a.m. on a cold, snowy morning, leaving chaos and carnage in its wake. The blast wrecked parked cars and shattered thick glass windows of the National Hotel, one of the city's most famous landmarks.

Moments after the explosion, four wrenched corpses and body parts could be seen on the sidewalk of Mokhovaya Street, which parallels the Kremlin's wall, less than 800 feet away.

President Vladimir V. Putin, who was meeting with legislators inside the Kremlin when the bomb exploded, denounced the bombing as an attempt to destabilize Russia's democracy and economic development and called for a redoubled fight against ``the actions of criminals, terrorists.''

Mr. Putin did not mention Chechnya, but the attack bore the characteristics of previous suicide bombings attributed to the bloody separatist war there.

Moscow's mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, said that the attack involved two women who asked a passerby for the way to the parliament, or Duma, which stands just across Tverskaya Street.

"Evidently the bomb went off on its own,'' the mayor told the Interfax news agency, suggesting that the parliament was the target of the attack. ``The National Hotel was not the place chosen by terrorists.''

The attack, coming after the one on Friday, raised fears of a new wave of suicide bombings. In the spring and summer, a series of attacks rocked Russia, including a dual suicide bombing at a rock concert in Moscow in July that killed 16 and a failed attempt five days later on Tverskaya Street, less than two miles north of the National Hotel. A security officer died trying to defuse explosives in a black sports bag in that attack.

After today's attack, the authorities evacuated the Kiev train station after the discovery of a package beneath a train car, but the package turned out to be harmless. Officials said they had ordered heightened security across a city that already has tight security, including the sealing off of much of Red Square since July.

Outside the National, police using dogs scoured the area for more bombs and pushed back crowds of journalists and passersby. Officials said that additional explosives were found on the headless body of a woman believed to have been the suicide bomber.

Just before 1:00 p.m. and again 40 minutes later, the police blew up the explosives and a briefcase that sat in the charred wreckage on the sidewalk. The explosions retorted with sharp cracks through the historic heart of Moscow that, like the original blast, could be heard for blocks around.

``We had just sat down when there was a wave of pressure and smoke and the smell of - I don't know - dynamite,'' said Manfred Fischer, a German businessman from Frankfurt who arrived in Moscow on Monday for an exhibition.

He had met his business partners in the hotel's lobby only moments before the bomb exploded outside. They decided to have coffee in the cafe inside - a decision, he said, that might have saved him from injury or worse.

Mr. Fischer said the lobby and entrance were strewn with shattered glass and three or four stunned victims, their heads smeared with blood. He helped a doorman bring one injured man inside from the cold and asked workers to gather blankets for the wounded. The experience left him stunned and frightened and relieved.

``I didn't know that Chechnya was so close to Moscow,'' he said.

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