The bombers struck at a ticket booth after guards refused to let them into the popular daylong outdoor festival that had begun several hours earlier at Tushino airfield in northwestern Moscow. "Everybody thought it was fireworks," said one young concertgoer interviewed by Rossiya television. He said he was standing just metres away from the entrance when the blast went off. "And then I saw a girl lying there, dead."
Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov told journalists that a passport belonging to a 20-year-old Chechen was found on one of the bombers. He added that the President signed a decree on elections in Chechnya today, and these attacks are probably linked to this event.
Earlier Saturday, President Vladimir Putin officially decreed presidential elections in Chechnya for October 5th, following a March referendum in which the Chechens voted to confirm the republic's place within the Russian Federation. That vote prompted Putin to declare that the nearly four-year-long war between separatist rebels and federal troops had come to an end. However, this declaration seems premature after a series of suicide attacks in Chechnya over the past few months killed some 100 people.
The attack at the concert - attended by some 40,000 people according to its organizers - was the most brazen by Chechen separatists since 41 rebels stormed a Moscow theatre in October and held 800 people hostage for three days. All of the rebels and 129 hostages died in that attack, most from a powerful gas pumped into the theatre to knock out the hostage-takers before a raid by federal troops. The theatre attack brought the Chechen war to the heart of the Russian capital for the first time since a series of fatal apartment blasts in August 1999. Those, too, were blamed on Chechen rebels. Putin, then Prime Minister, reacted by sending federal troops back into the breakaway republic in an "anti-terrorist" operation meant to crush the separatists. They have been fighting a brutal war with the rebels ever since. Following the March referendum, Chechen separatists said they were determined to disrupt Putin's peace plan, which has been criticized by Russian and Western observers for failing to include the republic's rebel leadership, and have been increasingly turning to methods used by Palestinians in their intifada against Israel, carrying out at least five suicide attacks - including Saturday's - this year.
