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Suicide bomb on bus in Russia kills five ahead of Sochi Olympics

A suicide bomber has killed several people and injured dozens in what appears to be the first in a promised campaign of terror against Russia ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

 

The explosion that ripped through a passenger bus in the southern city of Volgograd around 2 pm on Monday afternoon killed at least five and injured 20, the country’s Investigative Committee said on Monday afternoon.

While initial reports suggested the explosion may have been caused by a hand grenade, investigators said Monday afternoon that they were working on the “preliminary” assumption that the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.

If so, the attack would be the first major terrorist attack outside Russia’s resitve North Caucasus region since the suicide bombing of Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in 2011, in which 37 people were killed.

The damaged bus is examined by experts in Volgograd (SERGEI IVANISHIN/AP)

The Russian Investigative Committee named the suspected suicide bomber as Naida Asiyalova, a 30-year-old woman from Dagestan.

Eyewitness reports emerging from the southern city on Monday evening described how the bus was so packed that those caught in the explosion shielded others from the blast.

“My daughter was on that bus. She said it was just an explosion in the middle of the salonâ€Ķand those who died, they saved my daughterâ€Ķshe was at the front,” one witness told Echo of Moscow radio. It was a big, huge explosion. When I drove down to get her, half the bus was simply gone.”

The bombing has once again raised the macabre prospect of a terrorist attack against this February’s winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Doku Umarov, the Chechen leader of an Islamist group fighting to establish an independent emirate across the north Caucasus, has claimed responsibility for both the Domodedovo bombing and twin suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro in 2010.

Earlier this year he cancelled a ceasefire and called on his followers to strike the Olympics.

No group had claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday, but investigators will likely focus their efforts on Islamist insurgency operating out of the North Caucasus.

Interfax reported Monday that the bomber was a woman from Makhachkala, the capital of Russia’s insurgency-wracked republic of Dagestan.

FM

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