(Bloomberg) -- Russian police found a car laden with explosives at a railroad station near the Finnish border, five days after a train bombing killed 26 people in the country's worst terror attack outside the North Caucasus since 2004.It looks like Count Doku got another shipment of money...
The car was discovered yesterday in Segezh, a town in the Karelia region about 700 kilometers (430 miles) north of St. Petersburg, said Vadim Kashirin, head of the Interior Ministry's regional criminal investigation unit. The ministry will release more details today, Kashirin said by phone.
Russian law-enforcement officials have stepped up security patrols at possible terrorism targets amid their manhunt for suspects in the Nov. 27 attack on the Nevsky Express luxury train en route to St. Petersburg from Moscow.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin today vowed to implement "very tough" measures in the battle against terrorism and urged the country to be more vigilant against the threat. "All of society, every one of us, needs to be aware of this threat that has been with us all these years," Putin said in a live call-in television show with the nation.
Putin on Nov. 30 linked the Nevsky Express attack to an explosion that occurred on a railway line connecting southern Russia with Azerbaijan, calling it a "second terror attempt." No one aboard the Tyumen-Baku train was hurt in the blast.
Islamist Group
An Islamist group promoting independence for the Russian region of Chechnya claimed responsibility for the Nevsky Express bombing yesterday. The Armed Forces of the Caucasus Emirate, headed by Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov, said that "attacks will continue until the occupiers in the Caucasus end their policy of killing ordinary Muslims purely on the basis of religion," according to a statement posted on Kavkazcenter.com.
Villagers from the vicinity of the crash reported seeing four men who appeared to be from the Caucasus region and gave descriptions of two of them to investigators, the Interfax news service reported yesterday, citing an unidentified law enforcement official.
Federal forces continue to fight a local Islamic insurgency in the North Caucasus that grew out of the Chechen separatist movement of the 1990s. Russians outside the region have been spared large-scale attacks since 2004, when terrorists struck the Moscow metro and downed two passenger planes over southern Russia.
A Russian nationalist organization called Combat-18 also claimed responsibility for the Nevsky Express bombing, according to Ekho Moskvy. That version was later discarded, the Moscow- based radio station said.