Russian Police Stop Man in Car Wired With Land Mines and Explosives in Moscow

AP via TBO ^ | 2004-09-18 | Staff

[dread78645]

MOSCOW (AP) - Police stopped a man driving a car wired with land mines and explosives in downtown Moscow early Saturday, Russian security officials said.

The man, detained by Moscow police around 1 a.m., told police he had been paid $1,000 to park two cars with explosives in them along a Moscow street frequently used by top government officials, said the duty officer at the Federal Security Service.

The officer said the man later suffered a heart attack and died while in police custody, but he refused to elaborate.

Police later located a second car in a residential neighborhood in central Moscow and used a water cannon to open it. No explosives were found but residents of nearby buildings were evacuated as a precaution, said the officer, who refused to give his name.

After the man in the first car was stopped, police questioned him and found two land mines and seven ounces of TNT in the car. The mines were connected with wires and had an antenna attached to them.

Russian law enforcement officials are on heightened alert following a string of terrorist attacks over the past month, including the near-simultaneous bombings of two passenger jets, a suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station and the school hostage-taking in Beslan that ended in a hail of gunfire and explosions.

More than 430 people have been killed in the attacks, with some 338 of those deaths coming during the school massacre.

[Southack]

I recieved an email a short time ago from a freeper in Russia who had 2nd hand information that the Russians have been rounding up the *families* of the terrorists that they've been catching.

As the UN disintegrates into a global laughingstock, so too will the level of violence be escalated *against* terrorists, their families, their towns, etc.

People who live in the 9th Century simply have no idea of what's about to come down on them.

The AWB Has Expired - Gun Owners Have Won Again For All Americans!

[dread78645]

There is no Gitmo in Russia...

Lubyanka will have to do..

[ApesForEvolution]

Amen BTTT

[ApesForEvolution]

"Heart attacks" works for me...

[Fiddlstix]

The officer said the man later suffered a heart attack and died while in police custody, but he refused to elaborate.

That is so sad. Poor terrorist had a "heart attack".
</sarcasm>

[TASMANIANRED]

Putin has a face for poker.

[CWOJackson]

Russia's worst enemy may be its own police

Long rampant with bribery and corruption, Russia's police and military are suspected of opening the door to terror attacks in the name of profit.

BY DAVID McHUGH

Associated Press

MOSCOW - The heavily armed militants behind a deadly school raid in southern Russia passed through a region dotted by checkpoints whose chief purpose is to keep violence from spreading outside the breakaway Chechnya region.

How did they manage? To many people here, suspicion falls on police corruption that could be crippling Russian attempts to fight terrorists.

The school hostage-taking in Beslan and other recent terror attacks illustrate how bribery -- particularly in the police and military -- provides an opening to terrorists. The military often supplies weapons to the same enemy it seeks to vanquish.

For Russians long accustomed to bribing police officers, public housing managers, even nursery school directors, the corruption allegations aren't surprising.

Yet outrage over the school attack, which left more than 330 dead, has been fueled by reports suggesting that bribery played a role. First, the 30 attackers got through a region with many checkpoints without any apparent problem.

Citing police sources, the Russky Kuryer newspaper reported Thursday that two attackers, identified as Nur-Pashi Kulayev and Mairbek Shaybekkhanov, had been arrested in 2002 and 2003 but freed after what the paper said was a ''substantial'' payoff to police.

At an antiterror rally next to the Kremlin on Monday, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov asked furiously why the terrorists had new, high-quality Russian weapons.

Some reports suggest the weapons may have come in part from assaults on police facilities by militants in neighboring Ingushetia in June.

A one-time Ingush policeman, Ali Taziyev, is believed to have led the school seizure, and news reports identify him as the suspected leader of the Ingush assaults. Four Ingush police have been arrested on suspicion of assisting the attackers in those raids.

Even President Vladimir Putin, who has vowed repeatedly to crush the militants, mentioned the topic in an address to the country. ''We have let corruption affect the judicial and law enforcement sphere,'' he said.

Beslan hostages told journalists that the kidnappers taunted them, saying they had bribed their way past checkpoints. A police spokesman rejected those accusations, saying the terrorists used back roads that had fallen out of use and weren't patrolled.

The accusations were an echo of the 1995 raid by Chechen guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev on the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, where about 2,000 people were taken hostage at a hospital. Basayev said later in an interview that his band of fighters had intended to drive to Moscow, but the bribe money ran out.

Russian soldiers are widely believed to be a source of weapons for Chechen fighters; bribes to pass checkpoints in Chechnya are a near-universal practice; the prices for getting ID papers are well-known.

The school shooting came amid reports of bribery surrounding the apparent suicide bombings of two Russian airliners that crashed within minutes of each other last month, killing all 90 people aboard.

Police reportedly arrested an illegal ticket scalper at Moscow's Domodedovo International Airport who helped the Chechen women suspected in the attacks. The man reportedly was a former employee of Sibir airlines, which operated one of the planes.

________________________________________________

I guess a heart attack rules this out.

[MarMema]

The officer said the man later suffered a heart attack and died while in police custody, but he refused to elaborate.

ROFL!!!! I love these Russianisms.

[MarMema]

I remember when there were two chechen terrorists who were tried and send to prison in Russia.

Amazingly one died of sudden onset of leukemia. The other died shortly afterward of a mysterious internal hemmorhage. Both within something like 6 months of being imprisoned. I am not doing this justice, because the Russian reports were hysterically funny.

[MarMema]

Lack of passion and self-control are personal and spiritual goals in the Orthodox church, to which Putin belongs. I loved your pics, thanks! Wonderful.

[Stonewall Jackson]

Remember the movie The Jackal?

They had the Mafia henchman strapped down to a table and were hitting him with heavy jolts of electricity. One of the Russian officers looks over at the FBI agents and states that the suspect had an unrevealed heart condition and did not survive the procedure.

Yea, most people might like to see themselves above such actions, but I guarantee that if you had your hands on an individual who knew the location of a person who was planning to murder your entire family, most people would do whatever necessary to get that info from him. They may hate themselves for doing it, but they'd still do it.

[zbogwan2]

The officer said the man later suffered a heart attack and died while in police custody, but he refused to elaborate.

That's where the Russian Political System trumps ours in the treatment of Terrorist scum?

[ridesthemiles]

I hope a interrogator put his fist down the guy's throat, grabbed his heart, pulled it out of his chest and showed it to him as he died. Then I hope they display the body for a number of days. Let the crows have it.

[nmh]

You're too kind.

But I like your style.

[bk1000]

"Those heat attacks will do you in every time."

Heat attacks really stune my beeber.

[DoctorMichael]

Al Quaida inspired by the CIA, huu?

My guess would also be 'Yes', since it was one of the jobs of al Qaeda operatives to assemble any and all useful techniques and munitions they could find into Manuals to be diseminated both in their Camps and to operatives overseas.

[gcruse]

This from Pravda:

The terrorist, the source said, had a heart attack. He was hospitalized to Sklifosofsky's Institute in Moscow, where the man died later, despite doctors' lifesaving efforts.

[knighthawk]

I hope they got some info from him.

[CWOJackson]

"I hope they got some info from him."

Read #67. Dead men tell no tales.