Families seek victims of suicide bombing on Russian train

YESSENTUKI, Russia -- One family planned to bury their daughter in the wedding dress she had hoped to wear soon, while another mother wept Saturday after discovering her son alive but deeply disfigured from the suspected suicide bombing on a commuter train in southern Russia.

Hospitals -- and morgues -- were crowded with grieving relatives searching for loved ones who fell victim to Friday's early morning attack that killed 41 and injured 200 near the Yessentuki station, some 750 miles south of Moscow. Many were students from local schools and universities.

The blast -- the second on the train line since September -- seemed aimed at spreading alarm ahead of today's parliamentary elections in the already tense region near Chechnya. Government officials closed public markets on what is usually the biggest shopping day, and extra police flooded the streets.

Officers with dogs swept deserted train stations, where ticket sellers said no one wanted to travel on the commuter line.

The shrapnel-filled bomb, believed strapped to a suicide attacker, blew the train car apart some 500 yards from the station, a spot where passengers would have begun crowding together toward the doors.

Many of the victims were so disfigured that even their parents failed to recognize them and authorities had to revise the death count from 42 to 41 early Saturday, realizing their mistake after completing the grim task of collecting all the shattered the body parts. No one claimed responsibility, but government officials suggested Chechen rebels were behind the blast.

Marina Tishtsenko found her son, Oleg, his face charred black on one side and swollen on the other. Others in his room had suffered terrible head injuries and broken bones.

"The doctor said he would be OK," Tishtsenko said weeping and shaking her head as if she herself weren't sure. One family found their daughter in the morgue, and pledged to bury the bride-to-be in the dress she'd hoped to wear for her upcoming wedding.

Many relatives were too traumatized to talk after being redirected from hospital wards to morgues in search of their loved ones. They turned away in tears from journalists' questions.

The blast Friday was the latest in a series of suicide bombings and other attacks over the past year that have killed more than 275 people in Moscow and throughout the rebellious region of Chechnya, where Russian forces have been bogged down since 1999.

In September two blasts on the same railway line, which links the cities of Kislovodsk and Mineralniye Vody, killed six people. No group claimed responsibility for those attacks.

Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev said the remains of the suspected bomber Friday were found with grenades still attached to his legs. Three women also were involved in the attack -- two who jumped from the train just before the blast, and one who was gravely injured and unlikely to survive, he said.

Authorities also found unexploded grenades and remnants of a bag believed to have carried the bomb among the twisted metal hull of the carriage. The bomb was filled with shrapnel, prosecutors told Russian media.

"After yesterday's explosion, I'll never use a train," said Yuri Alexandrov on Saturday in Yessentuki, but then he sadly continued, "although a bus can be exploded too or they can take hostages. Such things are pretty common in the area."

Grigory Vyukhin, a third-year student at the Pyatigorsk Foreign Language Institute, said that he'd already stopped traveling by train after the September blast.

"My brother laughed at me and called me a panic-stricken person," he said. "But my fears weren't groundless."

President Vladimir Putin condemned the attack as "an attempt to destabilize the situation in the country on the eve of parliamentary elections" and he attributed it, as he has with other attacks, to international terrorism.

The deadly bombings of the past year -- and a Chechen rebel hostage-taking raid on a Moscow theater in October 2002 -- have exposed the inability of Russian authorities to ward off suicide attacks.

"Look at how many policemen there are on the streets. What are they doing if they can't protect us," said a woman in Yessentuki who would only give her first name, Yelena.