Russian police on Sunday hunted for the bombers behind an attack that killed around 25 people on an elite passenger train, while relatives undertook the grim task of identifying bodies.
It remained unclear why attackers had struck the Nevsky Express, a train popular with well-off Russians and foreign tourists, as it ran from Moscow to St Petersburg late on Friday evening.
“An active investigative and operational effort is under way to identify and find the individuals involved in the crime,” Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for investigators, said on state television.
Markin said forensic experts had returned on Sunday morning to the scene of the disaster, a wooded area about 400km northwest of Moscow, to look for clues.
The chief of Russia’s FSB security service had said earlier the blast that derailed the train was caused by an improvised explosive device with the force of 7kg of TNT.
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev has said that evidence suggests several persons took part in the attack and a description of one of the suspects has been released.
Meanwhile, the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church called on authorities to give a “powerful reply” to the people behind the train bombing.
“We believe the reply will be effective and powerful enough to show these shameful, terrible people that ... when the hand of an enemy is lifted against our lives, we are able to defend our citizens,” Patriarch Kirill said at a memorial service in Moscow.
The comments were the strongest statement of anger against the perpetrators by a senior public figure. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday called for calm and ordered officials to do everything to help the victims of the attack.
No one has claimed responsibility for the blast, but security analysts said militant groups from Russia’s mainly Muslim North Caucasus were the most likely culprits.
Another explosion hit a railway in Russia’s restive Caucasus region of Dagestan early yesterday.
“A railway was hit by an explosion before a train traveling from Tyumen to [Azerbaijan’s capital] Baku passed,” a local police official told Russian news agencies.
Separately, Dagestan’s interior ministry said its officers had defused eight booby-trapped bombs on the weekend along roads on the region’s border with Chechnya.
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
RSS