Suicide bomber kills 18 Russians (source UPI)
MOSCOW, June 5 (UPI) -- A female suicide bomber detonated a belt filled with explosives Thursday next to a bus filled with Russian air force personnel in North Ossetia, killing at least 18 people.
The woman, believed to be a Chechen, was dressed in a white medical coat covering shrapnel-filled explosives.
Police officials said she tried to board the bus, which was carrying between 27 and 40 people, many of them women, as it was leaving the town of Mozdok, near the border with Chechnya, destined for the Russian air base at Prokhladny, just four miles outside town.
The airfield is used by Russia's 4th Air Army.
According to Russian television networks, the driver apparently sensed something wrong and prevented the woman from boarding the bus, whereupon she detonated the explosives in an act of desperation outside the bus's front door, killing herself and at least 18 others, including five women passengers.
Witnesses said the woman had tried to enter the bus, and she had obviously intended to kill the maximum number of people in her kamikaze attack.
More than a dozen people were injured in the attack, seven of them critically, Emergency Situations Ministry officials said. The powerful explosion left the red-and-white a complete wreck.
Russia's Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said the identity of the bomber has not been established. "Little was left of her," he told the Interfax news agency.
Fridinsky said he believed the woman may have intended to get inside the airbase once aboard the bus, rather than bomb the bus itself, so as to cause even greater damage. But her plan was went awry when the bus driver refused to let her board the staff bus carrying air crew and the base's support workers.
At least 78 people were killed in two suicide attacks in Chechnya in May, but this is the first suicide attack in the neighboring Russian autonomous republic of North Ossetia, which is used by the Russian military as a base and staging ground for operations inside the rebellious Chechen territory.
Meanwhile, three U.N. observers -- two Germans and a Dane -- and their interpreter were seized by eight unknown assailants while monitoring a section of the Georgian-Abkhazian border.
Initially, the masked gunmen seized eight people, including four Russian peacekeepers, but the hostage-takers disarmed and released the Russian soldiers, who raised the alarm.
The peacekeepers and a 114-member U.N. monitoring team from the U.N. Observer Mission in Georgia, known as UNOMIG, control the demilitarized zone in the Kodor Gorge running between the former Soviet republic of Georgia and its breakaway territory of Abkhazia, which is claiming independence.
Georgian officials believe the hostage-takers are Abkhazian rebels who are holding their captives at the mountain village of Azhara.
The rebels have kidnapped U.N. monitors on at least three previous occasions, but the observers were released after negotiations.