A Russian police captain has been arrested in connection with last month's twin plane bombings by suspected Chechen suicide bombers that killed 90 people, Interfax reported on Tuesday, citing sources close to the inquiry.
Captain Mikhail Artamonov was ordered to be detained for 30 days under anti-terrorist legislation. Investigators are studying what charges to bring against him, the sources told the news agency.
Two men accused of helping the two suspected Chechen female suicide bombers to board the flights at Moscow's Domodedovo airport on Aug. 24 in return for bribes -- an airline employee and a middleman -- have already been arrested.
The women's passports were handed over to a police captain for verification but the unidentified captain released them without carrying out any document checks or physical searches.
The planes went down on the night of Aug. 24. One was a Tupolev 154 with 46 people aboard on a flight from Moscow to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, the other a Tupolev 134 with 44 people aboard flying from Moscow to Volgograd. All 90 people on both planes were killed.
Both planes left the same Moscow airport, Domodedovo, within one hour of each other. They went down at almost exactly the same moment in locations in southern and central Russia hundreds of kilometers apart.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia