The death toll in a suicide attack on a Russian military hospital near Chechnya rose to 35 yesterday, officials said.
The suicide attacker rammed a truck packed with explosives through the gates of the four-story red brick hospital Friday night in the city of Mozdok in the North Ossetia region, the region's Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said. He said that at the moment of the explosion, there were 98 patients and 21 employees inside the building, which collapsed like a house of cards.
PHOTO: AP
Deputy head of the regional Emergency Situations Ministry, Major-General Nikolai Lityuk, said 33 bodies were recovered from the rubble by yesterday morning. Another two bodies were spotted in the debris, he said.
Of 78 people taken to another hospital in Mozdok after the blast, 59 remained hospitalized, 10 of them in critical condition, Lityuk said.
Dzgoyev said many of the injured were soldiers who had been in the hospital recovering from wounds suffered in Chechnya, where Russia's second war against rebels in a decade has lasted nearly four years.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov broke off his summer vacation and left Moscow for Mozdok at the request of President Vladimir Putin, the Defense Ministry said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Lityuk said a Kamaz truck broke through the hospital gates, drove past some tents, pulled up at the reception office and exploded, leaving a crater 8m across and 3m deep.
"We were the first to arrive. Near the checkpoint of the hospital there were charred corpses," a medical assistant from Mozdok's central hospital, Galina, said on Rossiya television. "Tents that were put up near the main building were all gone, there was one wall left from the main building."
The force of the explosion was equivalent to at least a ton of TNT, Interfax quoted Fridinsky as saying.
A woman who lives 4km from the hospital told Ekho Moskvy radio that windows broke and plaster fell from walls in her neighborhood. "I saw a big column of smoke," said the woman, identified as Valentina.
Lityuk said preliminary information indicated one person was in the truck during the attack, the latest deadly assault aimed at the Russian military in and around Chechnya.
A fire broke out after the blast but was put out in about two hours. Emergency workers later picked through the rubble with heavy machinery and sniffer dogs, and a plane with rescuers and medical equipment was dispatched from Moscow, officials said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack -- the latest in a surge of suicide bombings that have killed more than 100 people in and near Chechnya and in Moscow since May.
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