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.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS