34, Including 12 Children, Killed as Bomb Rips Military Parade
By MICHAEL WINES
MOSCOW, May 9 — A bomb stuffed with bolts and nails and hidden in roadside bushes ripped through a military parade in southwest Russia today marking the end of World War II. At least 34 people died, including at least 12 children, Russian television reported, and another 130 were hospitalized.
It was the deadliest terror attack in Russia since September 1999, when a string of apartment-house bombings in Moscow and elsewhere killed more than 300 people.
No one took responsibility for today's explosion, which ravaged a military band as it marched, surrounded by youngsters and World War II veterans, through Kaspiisk, a town of about 12,000 people in Dagestan, a semi-autonomous Russian republic. The town sits on the western shores of the Caspian Sea about 1,000 miles south of Moscow.
But an angry President Vladimir V. Putin said the attacks were made by the same rebels who have been waging war against Russian forces for two years in Chechnya, which borders Dagestan.
Mr. Putin calls the rebels Islamic terrorists of the same stripe as those who were recently routed in Afghanistan. Most outside experts say the war is waged largely by ethnic separatists and gangs, although Islamic extremists have a foothold there as well.
"This crime was carried out by scum who hold nothing sacred," Mr. Putin said at a Kremlin reception marking Nazi Germany's defeat 57 years ago.
He added: "We have the right to regard them as Nazis, whose purpose is to sow death and kill. During the war, there was the slogan, `Tread the viper.' And it was destroyed. Difficult as the tasks facing us today are, they will be carried out."
May 9 — marked as Victory Day — remains an almost sacred holiday in Russia, which lost millions of soldiers and civilians in World War II, which is known here at the Great Patriotic War.
Terrorist bombings are not uncommon in Russia's mountainous Caucasus region, and nearly 70 people died in Kaspiisk in a 1996 bombing of a military apartment house. Federal security forces had swept the route of the Kaspiisk parade at 8 a.m., and officials speculated today that the bombers planted the remote-controlled device sometime after that.
Witnesses said the bomb went off as the brass band strode down the town's main street at about 9:45 a.m. playing a military march. Television footage broadcast tonight showed rows of blood-soaked victims laid out on stretchers in a grisly landscape of body parts and wrecked musical instruments.
Dagestan declared Friday a day of mourning. The Interfax news service quoted the province's leader, Magomedali Magomedov, as saying that the terrorists "must be destroyed as traitors who are not letting humanity live."
In Chechnya's capital, Grozny, unknown assailants fired a grenade launcher during a Victory Day observance in the city's stadium being led by the province's Kremlin-backed leader, Akhmad Kadyrov. Mr. Kadyrov was not hurt, but one policeman was seriously injured.
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