Moscow Death Toll Grows
Three more people have died from wounds suffered in a bomb blast that tore through a crowded underground passageway in Moscow, raising the death toll to 11, hospital officials said Saturday.
The bomb detonated during the evening rush hour Tuesday in a passage packed with kiosks selling everything from videos to clothes. Seven people died at the scene and more than 90 were wounded.
The three latest deaths were a man and a woman who died Saturday and a woman who suffered burns over 55 percent of her body and died Friday night.
Police reported no progress Saturday in finding the bombers, though official suspicion still centered on militants from Russia's breakaway republic of Chechnya, where federal forces are fighting rebels.
In a Saturday meeting with top officials, President Vladimir Putin urged security forces to do more to find the culprits.
Authorities were searching for three suspects whom witnesses saw fleeing the scene moments before the bomb exploded. In the days since, police have been frisking men and checking documents on city streets.
Police in Moscow seized hundreds of grams of TNT from two men, one of them a Chechen, the news agency ITAR-Tass quoted an Interior Ministry official saying Saturday. Both men were members of organized crime gangs, he said.
In Ufa, about 680 miles southeast of Moscow, a railroad car loaded with more than 17 tons of TNT was confiscated and an unspecified number of people detained in connection with the seizure, ITAR-Tass said, citing First Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Kozlov.
Chechen rebels also were blamed for apartment building explosions last September that killed about 300 people. Those blasts still haunt many Russians, and many feared the explosion Tuesday might have been the start of a new wave of violence.
Rebel leaders deny they were responsible for any of the attacks, and police said they also were considering whether gangsters could have been behind the blast.
Relatives and friends gathered for burials of seven of the dead on Friday. Another funeral was scheduled for Saturday.
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