Deadly blast at Moscow airport

25/01/2011| IslamWeb

At least 35 people have been killed and more than 150 injured in a blast at Moscow's busiest airport, health officials said.

The explosion at Domodedovo airport, in the southeast of the Russian capital, occurred on Monday afternoon inside the airport's international arrivals hall near the baggage area.

"Today at 4.32 pm (13:32 GMT) an explosion went off in the international arrivals hall of Domodedovo airport," the Russian investigative committee said in a statement.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said that the blast, according to preliminary information, "was an act of terror" and that those behind it would be tracked down and punished.

He also called for a new security regime to be introduced in all airport and transport hubs across the country in the wake of the attack.

Scenes of carnage

Eyewitnesses told Russian radio of a scene of carnage after the blast ripped through the baggage claims section of the airport.

"Burned people are running about ... they are carrying pieces of flesh on stretchers," a man called Andrei, who was standing near the information stand at the airport, told City FM radio.

"You can't tell the living from the dead. I was meeting someone. We are not protected in this country," another witness, Alexei, told the station.

A traveler named Viktor told the Russkaya Sluzhba Novostei radio station he heard a loud bang outside the airport.

"There was an explosion, a bang. Then I saw a policeman covered in fragments of flesh and all bloody. He was shouting 'I've survived! I've survived!'''

Neave Barker, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Moscow, said that Domodedovo airport is the busiest of the Moscow's three commercial airports, serving 22 million people last year.

"It's usually very, very busy in there ... This is a deadly target for this attack," he said.

"Many officials and journalists would have been flying out of Moscow to the Davos forum around this time. It's not clear whether this was timed to have the biggest international impact."

The Kremlin said that Medvedev was delaying his own trip to Davos as a result of the attack.

Security increased

Moscow police have stepped up security across the city following the blast.

But Russian media reports suggested that security services had received warning of a possible attack ahead of Monday's blast.

"The special services had received information that an act of terror would be carried out at one of the Moscow airports," the RIA Novosti news agency reported an unnamed security source as saying.

"Agents were seeking three suspects but they managed to access the territory of the airport, witness the explosion which their accomplice carried out and then leave the airport," the source said.

Separately, an airport security source told the Lifenews.ru website: "A tip-off with a warning that something was being prepared appeared one week before the explosion."

PHOTO CAPTION

Police officers check ID documents inside Moscow's Domodedovo international airport on January 24, 2011, soon after an explosion.

Al-Jazeera