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Terrorist bombing of Moscow Airport Jan. 24, 2011

Those who target innocent civilians are fylth and scum for every decent people in the world.

LOL. No offense but look at the country you are representing.
 
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Chechens are also muslims so i guess that is the reason Pakistanis support there freedom.

We dont support this and it was made clear when Musharraf visited Russia that Chechnya is internal matter of Russia. So next time before spouting nonsense at least get your facts straight.
 
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Chechens are also muslims so i guess that is the reason Pakistanis support there freedom.

If some Chechens have done this then we don't support them.

Muslims or not, it's a heinous crime to take civilians life and no freedom struggle can justify itself by taking innocent lives.It's not the fault of civilians that the Russian Govt has mishandled this issue.

RIP the poor souls.
 
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It's obvious who else will kill innocent people... very sad

this may be a distasteful time to bring it up, but Russians hand in Afghanistan; Chechna, Ingushetia and Daghestan is not exactly clean either.....these terrorist groups believe in eye-for-an-eye

it's not right in my opinion, but thats how it works amongst them....of course nobody claimed responsibility yet so it's better to just wait for further news and developments
 
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Russia: dealing with terrorism

Russia’s financial markets were shaken by the suicide bomb at Domodedovo airport on Monday, with equities falling 2.4 per cent as the news sunk in of 35 people dead and more than 100 injured.

But shares quickly recovered some ground as investors rightly judged that the atrocity would not destabilise either the Putin/Medvedev administration or the economy.

Since Vladimir Putin first took office as president in 2000, Russia has shown that it can take such shocks in its stride. But, the blast does revive doubts about Putin’s ability to transform Russia into the healthy modern society that many Russians crave – and that he has promised to deliver.

While nobody has yet claimed responsibility, suspicion has fallen on Islamist extremists from Russia’s northern Caucasus, who have staged many attacks over the past decade.

It may be no accident that this assault has been staged on the day that president Dmitry Medvedev was due to fly to Davos to speak at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum – and promote Russia as a secure and profitable country for international business.

Unlike previous terrorists attacks in Russia, which mostly targeted public buildings and domestic transport links, this outrage has hit a symbol of the country’s internationalisation – a busy modern terminal widely used by foreign airlines.

Medvedev has already pledged to pursue the perpetrators – and will doubtless seek them in the northern Caucasus, not least in the troubled territory of Chechnya.

Putin’s rise to power followed a series of terrorist bomb explosions that he blamed on Chechen terrorists and which triggered an all-out military assault on Chechnya in which tens of thousands died before Moscow re-imposed its authority.

The Kremlin poured men and money into reconstructing Chechnya but struggled to find a coherent response to the many challenges in the northern Caucasus – poverty, poor education, low health standards and the spread of Islamist extremism. Even as violence was suppressed inside Chechnya, often brutally, it erupted in the nearby Ingushetia and Dagestan. And no amount of activity by the security services has prevented terrorists attacks in other parts of Russia, notably the 2002 Nord Ost theatre incident when 170 died when Russia troops stormed a Moscow theatre where rebels had taken hostages captive, the 2004 Beslan school siege (2004, 331 dead) and 40 killed last year in two blasts on the Moscow underground.

While officials have pledged economic and social development programmes for the Northern Caucasus, and spent big sums, notably in Chechna, they have largely failed to successfully engage the local populations. The Muslims of the northern Caucasus, in particular, remain alienated.

With Moscow in control of overwhelming force, it is hard to see how the separatist extremists can take their fight beyond terrorism. But it is equally difficult to see how they can be persuaded to abandon violence when they see so few alternatives.

Until now, the terrorist attacks have had little effect on foreign business people. Investors have not put terrorist violence high on their list of dangers in Russia. They have avoided the north Caucasus, gone elsewhere, and worried more about other risks such as corruption and poor law enforcement.

Will that change with one attack on Domodedovo? Perhaps not. But two or three similar assaults could make some companies think twice about investing and/or deploying staff.

And Domodedovo could re-open nagging worries about the wisdom of staging the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, on the Black Sea, on the western edge of the Caucasus. While Sochi is a long way from Chechnya and populated mostly by incomers from other parts of Russia, it is a lot closer to the heart of the violence than is Domodedovo.

Russia: dealing with terrorism | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times ? FT.com
 
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Explosion at Moscow Airport


An explosion reportedly killed at least 31 people today at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, sparking fears of a new wave of terrorist attacks in Russia.


As Russian television showed images of Moscow airport’s bright international-baggage-claim hall strewn with debris and darkened with smoke, after an explosion that reportedly killed at least 31 people today, many Muscovites revisited the sinking feeling they experienced less than a year ago when more than 40 people were killed by female suicide bombers on the Moscow Metro.

For many of the capital’s citizens, the beige-and-red interiors of the Domodedovo airport are almost as familiar as the Metro itself, a symbol of the new prosperity brought to Russians under Vladimir Putin’s rule, their post-Soviet freedom to travel.

But as today’s explosion proved all too grimly—the Russian state has failed to bring security to its people.

A dozen years ago, Russians signed up to a clear, if unspoken, deal with the Kremlin. In September 1999, a series of unexplained bomb attacks demolished apartment buildings in Moscow and south Russia, killing 293 people. Vladimir Putin, then a relatively unknown former spook, was promoted to prime minister on the promise to protect Russia from secessionist terrorists from the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

Within weeks Russian troops were rolling into Chechnya, and Putin’s political career was launched. The bottom line of the deal Putin offered Russia was this: voters surrendered many of the freedoms they had enjoyed during the chaotic Yeltsin years in exchange for protection. Many Russian voters were only too happy to accept everything that followed—the rise of the Kremlin, Putin’s squashing of the oligarchs, the crackdown on independent media, and the end of local elections—because they believed that the state would fulfill its primary role: to guard the security of its citizens.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Chechnya itself was quickly subdued by the ruthless but effective expedient of arming one of the rebel groups and using it to torture, murder, and intimidate its way to victory. But the broader Russian-enforced peace across the North Caucasus didn’t bring the terror to an end. Instead, terror and Islamic radicalism metastasized like a cancer across the North Caucasus, and infected the volatile neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia.

The immediate result was that the Putin era has been punctuated by a steady drumbeat of terrorist outrages—from the Moscow theater siege in 2002, to the Beslan school massacre in 2004, to the Moscow Metro bombings last spring—that left a combined 495 dead.

But apart from those high-profile attacks, smaller terror is an almost weekly occurrence in the south Russian borderlands with the North Caucasus.

During the last 12 months, and counting just the incidents with double digit-fatalities, attacks have included the bombing of a racetrack in Nalchik, a market in Vladikavkaz, a cultural center in Stavropol, and a military base in Buinaksk. Terrorists from the Caucasus derailed a high-speed train between Moscow and St. Petersburg, attacked a power plant, and bombed numerous police stations across the region. Effectively, the Kremlin is fighting a low-intensity war in south Russia. But if a decade ago Russia was at war with Chechen rebels with a clearly defined set of goals focused on the independence of Chechnya, now the enemy is a shadowy plethora of tiny Islamist groups with a range of grievances against the Russian state, from blood feud to plain-vanilla ethnic nationalism.

One thing is clear, though: the authorities’ methods of fighting the insurgency—ranging from the kidnapping of family members of suspected militants to extrajudicial executions, well documented by human-rights groups—aren’t working.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the decade of terror is that Russian voters have failed to blame their leaders for their lack of security. On the contrary, Putin built his tough-guy image on such swaggering promises as “rubbing out the terrorists in the shithouse.” Polls regularly show that Putin is more trusted on security issues than his baby-faced, handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Though the failure to bring lasting peace to the Caucasus is Putin’s, it’s likely the more liberal Medvedev whose ratings will suffer from continued terror. “If Russia is hit with another wave of terror attacks or armed conflict, people will look to Putin,” says Alexei Grazhdankin of the Moscow-based Levada Center. “He is seen as a strong defender of the Russian state.” This evening Medvedev announced that he would be canceling a visit to the Davos conference to deal with the bombing.

Putin’s toughness is no mere rhetoric—at his instigation, a decade of very hands-on violence has been applied to the Caucasus, with little result. No one can reasonably blame the Kremlin for tonight’s appalling bomb attack on Moscow’s busiest airport. But it’s equally clear that Putin has built a police state that’s good at cracking down on dissent but bad at delivering security—not to mention honoring its basic contract with the people who surrendered their freedoms in exchange for a quiet life.


Explosion at Moscow Airport Sparks Terror Fears - Newsweek
 
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Suicide bomber strikes at Moscow airport

By Courtney Weaver in London and Isabel Gorst in Moscow

Published: January 24 2011 14:17 | Last updated: January 24 2011 18:22


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A picture taken from Russian TV channel NTV shows paramedics taking a person injured by a blast towards an ambulance


A suicide bombing killed at least 35 people and injured more than 130 in the international arrivals hall of Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, the second major terrorist attack in Russia in a year.

Police put the capital’s transport hubs on high alert and said they were stationing additional officers in public spaces to check for unattended baggage and parcels.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility. But Russian news agencies said authorities were investigating three men from the North Caucasus in connection with the attack.

There were chaotic scenes at the airport. Clouds of smoke filled the arrivals area as ambulance workers carried wounded people away. Television footage showed a mound of bodies lying on the terminal floor.

Monday’s bombing follows a further deterioration in relations between the Kremlin and separatists in the North Caucasus region, where an Islamist insurgency is building. Last March, 40 people were killed after two female suicide bombers set off explosions in Moscow’s metro. In November 2009, 26 people were killed on board a high-speed train between Moscow and St Petersburg.

“Russia cannot cope with the continued explosion of the Northern Caucasus. The so-called stability there is a myth,” said Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst at Moscow’s Carnegie Centre.

“Somehow we came to a very colonialist mentality that we shouldn’t care about the Caucasus because nothing can be done… But the Moscow bombings logically implies that Russia has lost the war with terrorists.”

President Dmitry Medvedev delayed a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was to deliver the opening speech on Tuesday. He vowed to track down and punish those behind the attack.

“Security will be strengthened at large transport hubs,” he wrote on Twitter. “We mourn the victims of the terrorist attack at Domodedovo airport. The organisers will be tracked down and punished.”

At Domodedovo, scores of ambulances were streaming in from Moscow, lining the curb and clogging the car park. Moscow’s mayor and the regional governor had been sent to the scene, Mr Medvedev said.

“When the explosion rang out, panic broke out, everyone ran out of the hall,” Sergey Gatuatulin, a journalist waiting in the arrivals hall, told Interfax. “I saw a small flame and heard a big clap next to me, and covered my head and ran.”

Britain’s Foreign Office advised UK citizens not to fly to Moscow and said it was working with Russian authorities to learn if any British nationals had been affected. German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the bombing as a “cowardly attack” while Barack Obama, US president, said he condemned “this outrageous act of terrorism against the Russian people”.

Russian news agencies cited a source who said police had been warned about the possibility of an attack on Domodedovo.

While the airport is considered Russia’s most modern transport hub, it has worked to rehabilitate its reputation after two suicide bombers were able to board flights at the airport in 2004 and blow up the plane mid-flight, killing all 90 people onboard.

Domodedovo said on its website it had delayed /held flights from China, Germany, Turkey, Vietnam and Armenia, and that Lufthansa and Air Berlin had delayed flights bound for Germany. At the airport, officials struggled to ensure that the airport was working normally, as passengers continued to arrive for their flights and airplanes could be heard taking off overhead.


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Some Checynians are Christians, some are Muslims.

But the apparent fact is the suicide bomber was an Arab, not a Checynian. Did you not see this fact?
 
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