MOSCOW, 29 December 2002 — Russian investigators yesterday said they saw an Arab connection in a bomb attack that struck at the heart of the pro-Moscow administration in Chechnya and left at least 55 people dead.
But Andrei Piontkovsky of Moscow’s Center for Strategic Studies said this year’s death of Khattab, a Jordanian-born fighter with reported links to the Al-Qaeda network, meant the Chechens have been forced to become far more self-reliant than in the past.
“This was the work of Arabs is a slogan that works well for the Russian propaganda machine,” he said. “It may be partially true, but with the death of Khattab, the influence of Arabs in Chechnya is diminishing.”
Meanwhile, as rescue teams continued to search for survivors amid the debris of the Chechen government headquarters in Grozny, devastated in Friday’s attack, the Emergency Ministry said the death toll had risen to 55, with a further 123 injured.
The spokesman for the Russian military’s anti-terrorist unit in the Northern Caucasus, Ilya Shabalkin, told the Itar-Tass news agency that the attack was organized by Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov and an Arab mercenary named Abu Tarik.
“A few days earlier we were tipped off about a forthcoming large-scale terrorist act to be carried out in Grozny by a group based in Stariye Atagi and headed by Abu Tarik,” Shabalkin said.
In a military operation at Stariye Atagi, a village 20 km south of Grozny that Shabalkin said was used as a base for terrorist activities, “we succeeded in killing Abu Tarik but were unable to prevent the terrorist act,” the spokesman said.
The initial tip-off was about a meeting between Chechen leader Shamil Basayev and another Arab named Abu Al-Walid, Shabalkin said.
On Friday, Shabalkin said the attack was ordered by Basayev and Al-Walid and financed by sources in several Arab countries which he did not name.
And on NTV television yesterday he said Chechen fighters had begun “resorting to so-called Arab methods, in which bombers attempt to penetrate areas where people are gathered and blow themselves up.”
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the organizers of the Grozny attack were “part of the global terror network,” specifically referring to Al-Qaeda.
In another development, Maskhadov disclaimed responsibility for the bombing and said yesterday on the Chechen website Kavkaz Center that he “could not support” the methods used by the suicide bombers. More than 24 hours after the attack in which the militants rammed a truck and a jeep loaded with dynamite into the government building, totally destroying it, Russian investigators had failed to obtain a lead on the identity of the bombers or their backers. (Agencies)
