VOLGOGRAD — A government aircraft carrying four people who were injured in a suicide bomb attack in Volgograd has landed at Ramenskoye Airport near Moscow, a ministry spokesman said Tuesday.
The aircraft, an Ilyushin Il-76 Candid airlifter, specially equipped to transport those wounded, has brought a 34-year-old woman and a 61-year-old man, who were in intensive care, a woman with facial burns and a man with a chest injury to clinics in Moscow.
At least six people were killed and 28 wounded Monday after a suspected female suicide bomber detonated an explosive device on a bus in the southern city of Volgograd.
Investigators said preliminary information indicated the attack had been carried out by Naida Asiyalova, a 30-year-old woman from Russia's republic of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus, which has been riven by unrest since the mid-1990s.
The government has implemented a wide range of measures to eliminate terrorist threats in Russia's restive south as the country prepares to host the Winter Olympics early next year in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. The attack, if proved to have been carried out by a female suicide bomber, will serve as a reminder of the persisting dangers from a decades-long insurgency in the North Caucasus.
Attacks on security forces, police and civilians generated by ethnic, religious and political rivalries, as well as poverty and corruption, occur regularly in the North Caucasus. The violence is also fed by an Islamist insurgency, which has been especially resilient in Dagestan and has fueled a series of separatist wars in the neighboring republic of Chechnya.
Suicide attacks by women in the early 2000s became a trademark tactic used by Islamist militants against civilian targets. Transportation has frequently constituted a soft target for attacks.
Suicide attacks carried out by two women from Dagestan on Moscow metro stations in 2010 left about 40 dead and some 100 injured.
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