Suicide Blast Kills 5 In Moscow

A suicide bomber blew herself up outside the National Hotel across from Moscow's Red Square on Tuesday, killing five bystanders, wounding at least 12 and sparking fears of a new wave of terror attacks in the heart of the Russian capital.

Politicians said the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, might have been the intended target — not the hotel. The attack came shortly before President Vladimir Putin addressed a meeting nearby at the Kremlin, and two days after Russian parliamentary elections.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said that there was at least one and possibly two female bombers and that they appeared to be lost before the blast, asking directions to the State Duma.

"Evidently, the bomb went off by accident," Luzhkov said, according to the Interfax news agency. "The National Hotel was not the place where the suicide bombers had planned to stage the explosion."

The National Hotel sits on a corner diagonally across from a gate leading into Red Square and the Kremlin. The State Duma is located nearby, across the capital's most elegant shopping street.

No group claimed responsibility, but past attacks have been blamed on rebels from the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Forty-four people were killed when a suicide bomber attacked a train in southern Russia last week.

The blast occurred near a Mercedes sedan parked on the sidewalk. Bodies and body parts were strewn about, including a head and a headless female body. Nearby was a black briefcase that authorities thought might contain more explosives, Interfax said.

Dozens of police cordoned off the blast site with red-and-white tape and pushed reporters and other bystanders away. The entrance to the normally crowded Okhotny Ryad metro station, around the corner from the blast, was closed.

A preliminary investigation indicated that the blast occurred outside a car and that the bomb contained about two pounds of TNT, said Yevgeny Gildeyev, a Moscow police spokesman.

Police were searching for a woman suspected of involvement in the attack, Gildeyev said. He said other explosives found near the hotel were destroyed. The ITAR-Tass news agency reported that an undetonated explosive also was found on the bomber's body.

Five people were killed and 12 hospitalized, five of them in grave condition, said Lyubov Zhomova, the spokeswoman for the Moscow medical directorate.

Kirill Mizulin, another police spokesman, said a Chinese national was among the injured. ITAR-Tass reported that medical workers on the site said most of the victims appeared to be passers-by.

A Norwegian journalist, Amund Myklebust, said he had been just inside the National Hotel's doors when he heard the blast shortly before 11 a.m. local time.

"We saw bodies lying around," he said. "Everybody was shocked."

Asked if he, too, was in shock, Myklebust replied, "Well, when you're in Moscow, you always have this thing at the back of your head that you're not 100 percent safe here."

Police evacuated the Kiev railway station Tuesday afternoon after finding what they called a suspicious looking object under a train that travels between Moscow and the Moldovan capital, Chisinau.

In the Kremlin, Putin later referred to terror threats in his address to regional leaders commemorating the 10th anniversary of the nation's constitution, which will be celebrated Friday.

"(The constitution) is a foundation for the development of a free market economy, democracy, and the development of the nation as a whole and the preservation of its territorial integrity. The actions of criminals, terrorists, which we have to confront even today, are aimed against all that," Putin said.

Russians have been jittery about terror acts since a series of explosions in Moscow and southern Russia blamed on Chechen rebels.

Nearly 300 people have been killed in Russia in bombings and other attacks blamed on Chechens over the past year.

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

A suicide truck-bomb attack last December destroyed the headquarters of Chechnya's Moscow-backed government and killed 72 people, and another killed 60 at a government compound in the region in May. Later that month, a woman blew herself up at a religious ceremony, killing at least 18 people.

In June, a female suicide attacker detonated a bomb near a bus carrying soldiers and civilians to a military airfield in Mozdok, a major staging point for Russian troops in Chechnya, killing at least 16 people.

Russian forces have been bogged down in Chechnya since 1999, when they returned following rebel raids on a neighboring Russian region. Earlier, they fought an unsuccessful 1994-96 war against separatists that ended in de facto independence for the region.

A double suicide bombing at a Moscow rock concert in July killed the female attackers and 15 other people, and an explosive device a woman brought into downtown Moscow less than a week later killed an expert who tried to defuse it.