Posted on 05/13/2003 7:24:14 AM PDT by dead
The Russian foreign ministry linked a series of suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia and Chechnya, as a top Russian official accused al-Qaeda of being behind the deadly blast in the breakaway republic.
"The blasts in Saudi Arabia, in Chechnya and other places - these are links in the same chain," Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement.
"This leaves no doubt that the problem of terrorism in all its forms has not only not disappeared, but that it calls for the further mobilisation and concentration of the powers of all countries to fight against this evil," he said.
Overnight, three blasts targeted residential compounds housing westerners in Riyadh, killing between 40 and 50 people on the eve of a visit by US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Mr Powell, who was due to arrive in Moscow after visiting Riyadh, said the Saudi blasts had "all the earmarks of al-Qaeda".
Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for the Russian military's anti-terrorist unit in the Northern Caucasus, accused Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov of receiving support from al-Qaeda to organise the truck bomb attack on a local government building in the northern Chechen village of Znamenskoye that killed at least 54 people.
"Recently, Maskhadov himself has threatened to carry out terrorist acts in the republic," he said, quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency.
The head of Chechnya's pro-Russian administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, has also accused the rebel leader of being behind the blast, but a Maskhadov spokesman denied the rebel president's involvement.
"The financing of all terrorist acts in Chechnya is undertaken with money from international terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, through Arab mercenaries," Mr Shabalkin said.
"Maskhadov long ago became a puppet in the hands of international terrorists and he carries out their orders without discussion," he added.
Russian and Chechen officials insist the rebel leader is one of the main backers of separatist violence - a charge he has repeatedly denied.
Mr Maskhadov was elected to a five-year term as president of Chechnya in polls held after the end of the republic's first separatist war in 1996, but was later disavowed by Moscow as well as many die-hard Chechen rebels who accused him of collaborating with the pro-Moscow regime.
Russia has regularly framed its nearly four-year-long war against separatist rebels in Chechnya as part of the global war against terror.
AFP
The Islamists are so ham-handed in their conception of international relations that they will (by their Chechen wing) push Russia fully into the anti-terrorist war, despite their attempt to oppose the US on Iraq.
Actually, there was some sense in the Russian position: Iraq was Ba'athist, and while the old regime could have cooperated tactically with al Qa'eda and other Islamists against the West, they also could not support a broad Islamist victory since it would spell their overthrow as well. We may hope that the victory in Iraq will clarify things, and the Russia will become a reliable ally now that only an obvious common enemy remains.
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