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Russia confirms killing of passenger train bomber
 Russia confirmed Saturday that its forces had killed the militant leader Aleksandr Tikhomirov, who under the name Said Buryatsky is believed to have trained suicide bombers in the North Caucasus. And Russian officials said they had proof that his organization was behind the bombing of a luxury train in November. Aleksandr Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service, told Russia's president that it "has been proved absolutely certainly" that a charred body retrieved after a huge raid on the village of Ekazhevo in Ingushetia was that of Mr. Tikhomirov. He said federal investigators in Ekazhevo had uncovered material evidence establishing that Mr. Tikhomirov's group was responsible for the bombing of the luxury train, the Nevsky Express, which killed 28 and wounded more than 90. He also said genetic tests performed on the bodies of fighters killed in the raid "give grounds to presume" that they had bombed the train. Mr. Bortnikov said eight fighters were killed and 10 were detained during the federal raid, which sealed off the village of 25,000 before dawn on Tuesday. Chechnya's president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, celebrated even before Mr. Tikhomirov's death had been confirmed, telling reporters in Grozny that the man was a "bastard schizophrenic" who worked for Western intelligence services. But Ingushetia's president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, was far more circumspect. "They killed him, but in his place will come some other ideologist," Mr. Yevkurov said Saturday at a meeting with relatives of men who were sheltering Mr. Tikhomirov, where he urged them not to "allow this dirt to come out of your house." "Our goal is not to kill them, but to extract them from the system," he said of the fighters, according to the RIA Novosti news service. "We will put the guilty behind bars, let them pay for their actions according to the law, and then leave corrected, but alive and well, just so that they do not continue killing people." He went on to say that a bomb laboratory in Ekazhevo was responsible for the most notorious attacks of the past year, including an attempt on his life in June and an August suicide bombing at a police station that killed at least 25 and wounded more than 150. The Federal Security Service released a statement on Saturday saying its forces had killed four brothers in the Kartoyev family, as well as the man who financed the militants, an official in the regional office of the Russian Federal Treasury. The statement said there was "documentary evidence" that one of the Kartoyev brothers, Turkhan, had bombed the Nevsky Express. During a search of the area, the statement said, the authorities found more than a ton of aluminum nitrate and plastic explosives, as well as a workshop used to make improvised explosive devices. They also retrieved "material evidence" linking the group to the bombing in November and explosive devices identical to the one used in a train attack in 2007. Belan Kartoyev, a resident of Ekazhevo who said he was no relation to the Kartoyev brothers, said the men were construction workers uninvolved in terrorism. In a telephone interview, he said that at least three other people were killed at a second location in Ekazhevo, but that they were strangers to the village. "I have no idea who those people were," he said. "I doubt anyone here knows them." Posted by: ryuge 2010-03-07 |
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