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Chechen vote to go ahead, Russia says

A rescue worker helps a victim of the blast near Tushino airfield on Saturday. At least 15 people were killed and around 50 injured when two female suicide bombers blew themselves up outside a rock concert at the airfield near Moscow. PHOTO: AFP

Russia vowed that elections in Chechnya would go ahead later this year despite a double suicide bombing in Moscow, blamed on separatists, which killed at least 15 people and wounded scores at a rock concert.

The attack, carried out by two women, shattered the bright Saturday afternoon at Moscow's Tushino airfield where tens of thousands had gathered to hear well-known Russian bands. At least 60 people were wounded, police said.

President Vladimir Putin stressed the government's "business as usual" line by preparing to leave yesterday on a scheduled trip to Uzbekistan, Malaysia and Azerbaijan.

"It's obvious that the goals of the explosions which terrorists carried out in Tushino were ... the planned elections for the president and the parliament of the republic [of Chechnya]," Putin's special representative for human rights in Chechnya, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, told Interfax news agency.

But he added it would not be possible to disrupt the process "by the forces of international terrorism and their allies."

The death toll in the worst such incident to hit Moscow since last October, when 129 hostages and 41 Chechen guerrillas died in a siege at a theater, was confused late on Saturday.

Moscow police spokesman Valery Gribakin said 14 people as well as the two female bombers had died. But Russia's First Channel television said 17 were dead by 9pm, and many more were in intensive care.

Deputy Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, speaking on First Channel's news, praised police for their thoroughness in searching visitors to the concert, as a result of which the women apparently killed themselves outside the main concert area on realizing that they would not get past security.

"I can only imagine what the consequences might have been" had they got into the main crowd, he said, adding that 35,000 to 40,000 people were at the concert. He thanked police for working "correctly and professionally."

Central Moscow remained calm on Saturday evening, although the city is always heavily policed and machine-gun-toting officers wearing body armor are a common sight.

But the bombing in the capital, coming so soon after October's theater siege, brought the issue of Chechen separatism, and resentment by many there of Moscow's rule, home to Muscovites who have long been used to stories of suicide bombings and mass killings in Chechnya itself.

Interfax quoted the interior ministry as saying policing would have to be tightened at future mass public events, and asking for "patience and understanding of the need for such measures in the complicated situation."

But witnesses at another huge public outdoor event, a beer festival in a central Moscow park attended by several thousand on a glorious summer day, said there was no disruption even after visitors heard the news from the airfield.
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