Russia’s Caucasus rebels remained conspicuously silent yesterday after investigators pinned the blame for a Moscow airport bombing that killed 35 people on a 20-year-old man from the region.
The Investigative Committee reported in findings on Saturday that the suicide bomber was specifically targeting foreigners when he set off his charge last Monday at the international arrivals hall of Moscow Domodedovo International Airport.
The Domodedovo blast killed eight foreign citizens in an attack that appears to mark a fundamental shift in the strategy followed by Islamists in their bloody 15-year campaign against Russian rule.
“According to investigators, the act of terror was first and foremost aimed against foreign citizens,” Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said in televised remarks.
The spokesman refused to give the man’s name or the republic he came from because the police were still on the hunt for the masterminds of the bloody strike.
Militants from the North Caucasus — a predominantly Muslim region that besides Chechnya also includes the impoverished republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia — have claimed responsibility for most other recent bombings.
However, no Islamist organization or leader has taken credit for an attack that came less than a year after a twin suicide bombing killed 40 people on their way to work on the Moscow subway.
News of the investigators’ airport findings were also completely ignored by the three main Web sites used by Russia’s Islamists.
One of the biggest sites — kavkazcenter.com — last week even went out of its way to scoff at suggestions that it somehow approved of the Moscow attack.
Russian analysts of the region said it was premature to say that the militants had indeed shifted their strategy and were now trying to target foreigners in a bid to scare both visitors and lucrative investors.
“This is still a hypothesis that remains fairly hard to believe,” said Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
“You would need to see more than one attack to say that something like that was really happening,” the analyst said.
Malashenko said the militants probably decided on Domodedovo for the simple reason that it was a soft target.
“If they really tried to kill as money foreigners as possible, they would have struck Sheremetyevo,” the analyst said in reference to a Moscow airport whose second wing only handles international flights. “Domodedovo is simply the easiest target — this is something that has been known for a long time.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the