MOSCOW - A suspected suicide bomber has struck at Russia's busiest airport, killing at least 35 people and challenging Kremlin efforts to crush armed insurgency and tackle growing nationalist tensions in the country's heartland.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Monday's attack at Moscow's Domodedovo airport; but the action bore many of the hallmarks of militants fighting for an Islamist state in the North Caucasus region, on Russia's southern frontiers.
Dense smoke filled Domodedovo's international arrivals hall and a fire burnt along one wall.
"Taxi drivers lined up in the arrivals hall were blown up. Pieces of their bodies covered us," Artyom Zhilenkov, 30, told Reuters as he pointed to pieces of human flesh on his coat.
North Caucasus rebels have threatened attacks against cities and economic targets in the run-up to parliamentary elections this year and 2012 presidential polls. But the choice of Domodedovo, resulting in the deaths of several foreigners, suggested the attackers, whoever they were, sought to raise uncertainty beyond Russia's borders.
Russia is due to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, which some Islamist rebels consider "Russian occupied" territory, and the 2018 soccer World Cup.
President Dmitry Medvedev said he would track down and punish those behind the bombing, which also injured over 150 people arriving in Moscow on a busy late afternoon. He ordered increased security at transport hubs and public meeting places.
U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the "outrageous act of terrorism" and offered Moscow help. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was shocked, state TV said.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the more powerful in Russia's 'tandem' political leadership, built his early reputation as a strong leader by launching a war in late 1999 to crush a rebel government in the Northern Caucasus's Chechnya region. That campaign achieved its immediate aim, but since then, insurgency has spread to neighbouring Ingushetia and Dagestan.
It has also assumed a more ruthless edge, spawning hardline factions difficult to monitor. Putin and Medvedev have said they would crush the rebel movements, but their control in the region has sometimes looked tenuous.
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Source: Yahoo! Singapore, news
Video by skynews.
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