Search ends at Chechen building attacked in suicide bombing

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia -- Rescue teams have stopped searching for survivors in the Chechen government building destroyed in a suicide bomb attack that killed 57 people, an official said Sunday.

Emergency teams no longer have hope of finding victims alive, said Vladimir Ustinov, a duty officer at southern Russia's Emergency Situations Department.

The blasts killed 57 people and wounded at least 132, Ustinov said. Some 90 wounded people remain in hospitals, he said. Of those, 26 were flown to the Russian military base at Mozdok, near Chechnya, and 15 flown to Moscow for treatment.

The bombing Friday destroyed the headquarters of the Kremlin-backed administration in the Chechen capital Grozny and dealt a blow to Moscow's efforts to demonstrate progress in the war in Chechnya.

Officials have said that three suicide bombers used Russian military uniforms, IDs, and license plates to drive their explosives-laden trucks through security checkpoints in Grozny.

They burst through the building gates and set off the explosions, blowing away doors, windows, and the interior walls and leaving the building a concrete shell.

The bombers' ability to penetrate the headquarters, one of the most heavily guarded compounds in Grozny, has raised questions about Russian security in the city.

A top Russian official repeated claims that international terrorists were behind the bombing.

The terrorists are "trying to provoke a civil war in Chechnya and stain the Chechens with Chechen blood," President Vladimir Putin's human rights envoy for Chechnya, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, said Saturday in an interview with Rossiya television.

The explosions were aimed at disrupting plans for a constitutional referendum in Chechnya and undermining the process of rebel disarmament, Sultygov said.

A Russian counterterrorism official, Col. Ilya Shabalkin, has said that Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev and an Arab militant, Abu al-Walid, ordered the Grozny bombing, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Shabalkin said Basayev and al-Walid, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, met with other rebels in the Nozhai-Yurt region of Chechnya before the bombing and al-Walid urged the rebels to carry out major terrorist acts in Grozny and other regional centers in Chechnya.

Shabalkin also implicated Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in the bombing. A spokesman for Maskhadov has denied the rebel leader played any role in the attack.

Russian troops left Chechnya in 1996 after a disastrous 20-month campaign against the rebels but returned in 1999 after a rebel incursion into a neighboring region and a series of apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people.