10 Muscovites have been killed by a bomb that exploded today in a crowded market:
According to Moscow’s First Deputy Mayor Vladimir Resin, a “makeshift explosive device” blew up. Earlier, police blamed a faulty gas cylinder.
Two men have been arrested in connection with the blast, and already the speculation about who was behind the bomb has begun.
Two rather obvious groups fall under immediate suspicion - local gangsters, or Chechen terrorists. (Although there are probably a few cynics out there who will suggest that the Russian government, needing to rally their people behind an imaginary enemy, were behind it).
RIA Novosti are reporting that the authorities in Moscow – who have the advantage of having interrogated the two arrested men – are leaning towards the local gangsters, saying that this explosion is a part of a local turf war. This is my initial reaction, as well.
- For starters, it fits a pattern – there have been quite a few bombings in crowded markets across Russia that have been linked to local turf wars.
- Second, no-one has admitted to the bombing – as I write this, more than 10 hours have passed since the explosion and no-one has claimed responsibility. Terrorists aim their message at a wide audience – the public – nd like to spread the news of their successes as far and wide as possible. Criminal gangs, meanwhile, tend to be sending their message to a relatively small group of people. Those people won’t need to rely on the news media to know who attacked them.
- Third, the Russian government hasn’t pinned the blame on terrorists – the Kremlin rarely misses a trick when it comes to talking up the threat of Islamic terrorism. If they had any kind of evidence linking this to Islamic/Chechen terrorism, you can bet we’d have heard about it by now.
I await further news, but this seems to me to be a worrying escalation in the scale of Russian gang wars, rather than an act of terror directed at Russia as a whole.