Russia train crash 'caused by bomb'

[[R_H]]

BBC

A bomb blast caused a Russian express train with nearly 700 people on board to derail, killing at least 26 people, intelligence officials say.

The Nevsky Express derailed in remote countryside on Friday night while travelling between the capital Moscow and the second city, St Petersburg.

Russian investigators found "elements of an explosive device" at the scene, an official statement said.

A senior intelligence official said a bomb had derailed the locomotive.

Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia's domestic intelligence service, told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that a bomb equivalent to seven kilos (15 lb) of TNT had been detonated, Reuters reported.

There was no immediate confirmed claim of responsibility for the attack.

The train was travelling on one of Russia's busiest rail routes and Friday evening is peak travel time.

'Loud bang'

Russia's prosecutor-general has opened a criminal case on terrorism charges, Russian news agencies report. Hundreds of rescuers and officials worked throughout the night at the scene near the town of Bologoye in Tver region. Some reports say as many as 39 people have died.

The train was carrying more than 650 people. More than 90 are in hospital, some of them taken there by helicopter.

Many of the injured are said to be in a serious condition.

Some passengers reported a loud bang occurring just before the derailment.

And Russian television channels broadcast a recording of a mobile phone call from the train driver to the emergencies ministry.

"There was an explosion under the locomotive," he said. "I do not know what we hit. We are derailed. The locomotive and carriages, I do not know yet what else, everything is in smoke. "

In 2007, a bomb on the same line derailed a train, injuring nearly 30 passengers.

Two men suspected of having links to Chechen rebels were accused of planting a bomb next to the track.

Derailed Nevsky Express train was blown up - law enforcement source

The Nevsky Express train bound for St. Petersburg that got derailed Friday evening killing at least 25 people was blown up, a law enforcement source said Saturday.

"Preliminarily, an explosion occurred under the ninth car," the source said, adding that the death toll could rise as new bodies were being taken out of the deformed railroad cars.

According to the latest data, 87 people were injured in the accident on the Alyoshinka-Uglovka section near the town of Bologoye on the border between the Tver and Novgorod regions, and 32 are unaccounted-for.

Three cars of 14-car train No. 166 that left Moscow at 19:30 Moscow time [16:30 GMT] went off the tracks two hours later, with two cars flipping over, according to eyewitness reports.

Passengers of the train that reportedly carried 661 passengers and 21 railroad employees said they heard a clap and some of them also saw a crater under the train. "There was a clap. The last two cars almost fell apart. I've seen such things only in movies," passenger Alexander said.

Those seriously injured could be delivered to Moscow hospitals by helicopters, emergencies officials said.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, immediately informed about the tragedy, ordered that all possible resources be used to render medical assistance to those harmed.

The Russian Railways (RZD) railroad monopoly earlier said that an act of sabotage could have derailed the train, but power outage on the railroad was also considered a possible reason for the accident. A Moscow police source told RIA Novosti earlier that the train driver had used the emergency brakes just before the derailment.

Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu is presiding over an emergency conference to deal with the derailment and its consequences. Medics, rescuers, Federal Security Service officers, law enforcers, and railroad specialists are working at the site.

RZD earlier said fifty injured passengers have been sent to hospitals in nearby towns. Those not injured left the site inside cars, buses and on another train bound for St. Petersburg.

Russian Railways said trains will move along a bypass route after the accident to keep railroad communication between the two largest Russian cities running. Several dozen trains currently on their way to St. Petersburg from Moscow will be delayed by at least 8 hours, RZD said.

It takes Nevsky Express trains that can travel at 200 kilometers per hour (124 mph) some four hours to travel about 650 kilometers from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

[FSTargetDrone]

There has apparently been a secondary bomb explosion at the site:

Second Bomb Explodes At Russian Train Crash Site

by The Associated Press

UGLOVKA, Russia November 28, 2009, 09:07 am ET

A second explosive device partially detonated during clean-up operations near the site where a homemade bomb derailed a high-speed Moscow-to-St. Petersburg train Saturday. No one was hurt in the second blast, but at least 26 people were killed in the wreck and dozens more were injured, Russian officials said Saturday as they opened a terrorism investigation.

The head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Alexander Borotnikov, said an improvised explosive device equivalent to 15 pounds (7 kilograms) of TNT had detonated when the train passed over it Friday night about 9:30 p.m. Remains of the device were found at the site of the crash, Borotnikov said.

"Indeed, this was a terrorist attack," the Interfax news agency cited Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for federal prosecutors, as saying. He told the ITAR-Tass news agency the bomb crater on the track was 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep.

The derailment of the upscale train, which was popular with government officials and business executives, was Russia's deadliest terrorist strike outside the volatile North Caucasus region in years.

The force of the derailment crumpled several cars in a remote rural area, trapping some injured passengers in the wreckage for hours and scattering luggage and metal pieces across the track. As of late Saturday, authorities still said 18 people were unaccounted for.

The last three carriages of the 14-car Nevsky Express careered off the tracks Friday night as the train approached speeds of 200 kilometers per hour (130 mph), officials said. More than 650 passengers and staff were on the train when it derailed near the border of the Novgorod and Tver provinces, some 250 miles (402 kilometers) northwest of Moscow and 150 miles (250 kilometers) southeast of St. Petersburg.

Reports on the death toll varied.

Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said at least 26 people were killed, 18 were missing and nearly 100 were injured and hospitalized in the derailment. The Prosecutor General's office said the death toll had risen to 30, with 60 others in the hospital.

There have been no credible claims of responsibility.

But sketches were being composed of several suspects, Interior Ministry head Rashid Nurgaliyev told Interfax, including of a man with ginger hair who is about 40 years old.

Witness accounts appeared to back up reports of a bomb blast.

"It was immensely scary. I think it was an act of terrorism because there was a bang," passenger Vitaly Rafikov told Channel One state television. He said he helped with the rescue, hauling victims from the wreckage and lighting fires for warmth.

Passenger Igor Pechnikov was in the second of the train's three derailed cars.

"A trembling began, and the carriage jolted violently to the left. I flew through half of the carriage," he said.

Terrorism has been a major concern in Russia since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, as Chechen rebels have clashed with government forces in two wars and Islamist separatists continue to target law enforcement officials.

Amid the reports of terror, President Dmitry Medvedev called for calm.

"We need there to be no chaos, because the situation is tense as it is," he said.

The injured were transported to hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg by bus, train and even helicopters, but some said the evacuation was agonizingly slow.

Yekaterina Ivanova, a wounded passenger, told the NTV television network that workers took at least four hours to get her out of the train.

"In the hospital, the doctors are better, the medical teams are working in harmony," she said. "The young people from the Ministry of Emergency Situations carried us out on stretchers, but other people in uniform were just standing there and staring, and no one was even helping to carry out the wounded."

Police and prosecutors swarmed over the disaster site Saturday and restricted access to the bomb crater. Rescue workers scoured the wreckage, searching for the missing, as two huge cranes lifted up pieces of twisted metal.

A battered railway carriage lay on its side across the tracks, while baggage and metal debris were scattered in the mud. Emergency workers wrapped up in blankets and huddled around fires as a light rain started to fall.

Their efforts came to a halt after the second explosion was heard, forcing Russia's security services to close rail links between the two main cities that had been partially reopened, Yakunin said.

Military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer told APTN that Islamist separatists who operate in the North Caucasus and nationalist groups would naturally fall under suspicion.

One prominent nationalist group, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, issued a denial of responsibility Saturday. Nationalists were blamed in a similar blast that caused a derailment along the same line in 2007, injuring 27 passengers. Authorities arrested two suspects in the 2007 train blast and are searching for a third - a former military officer.

Across Russia's North Caucasus region, attacks are relatively frequent. In August, a suicide bombing of a police station in Ingushetia's capital killed 25 people and injured 164. A September 2004 attack on a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan ignited a three-day hostage-taking ordeal in which more than 330 hostages were killed in a botched rescue. In addition, a December 2003 suicide bombing of a train near Chechnya killed 44 people.

But outside the volatile southern region, the last fatal terrorist attacks occurred in August 2004. A suicide car bombing in Moscow that month killed 10 people only days after bombs ripped through two passenger aircraft, killing more than 80 people. Those attacks were blamed on Chechen rebels, as was a February 2004 Moscow subway bombing that killed 40 people.

A 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theater ended with the deaths of around 130 people.

Another train derailment in June 2005 left at least 12 injured on a train that had been traveling from Chechnya to Moscow.

[Questor]

How would you defend against this kind of thing? I can't see an economical way to secure all of the railroad right of ways.

Was this the overnight train? It looks like the one I road all those years ago.

[Edi]

41 dead according to Finnish sources. This was pretty big news here.

[salm]

I allways wondered why terrorists don´t do this sort of thing all the time. It doesn´t even need a bomb. You just have to put a piece of steel that fits onto the track and leads the train off of the track. We had some dickheads in Germany a couple of years ago who did that.
Or throw bricks onto highways from bridges onto cars on a regular basis. Basically anything cheap and low tech and with small risk of being cought that damages or cripples the infra structure.

[Mr Bean]

I allways wondered why terrorists don´t do this sort of thing all the time. It doesn´t even need a bomb. You just have to put a piece of steel that fits onto the track and leads the train off of the track. We had some dickheads in Germany a couple of years ago who did that.
Or throw bricks onto highways from bridges onto cars on a regular basis. Basically anything cheap and low tech and with small risk of being cought that damages or cripples the infra structure.

In the US at least there are highway traffic camera's near most major cities on all the highways that along with allow the police to monitor traffic flow, follow escaping criminals and because it's kids not Terrorists who do it here, watch over-passes to see when people throw stuff down off them.

Not to mention anyplace that it's an issue normally gets a fence on the overpass you can't climb over and is nine or so feet tall with a over-hang so unless you stand in traffic on the bridge, it's not easy to lop things over the side.

[FSTargetDrone]

There are still many places along highways and rail lines that are easily accessible by determined people.

I allways wondered why terrorists don´t do this sort of thing all the time. It doesn´t even need a bomb. You just have to put a piece of steel that fits onto the track and leads the train off of the track. We had some dickheads in Germany a couple of years ago who did that.
Or throw bricks onto highways from bridges onto cars on a regular basis. Basically anything cheap and low tech and with small risk of being cought that damages or cripples the infra structure.

Because the threat of terrorism is generally overstated? Look at the US, there are just far too many public places to defend against, but major terrorist attacks are still rare (in general), even today with the US engaged in 2 wars that are seen by certain groups as a major affront to their religious sensibilities.

And consider, the die-hards who do not care about being caught, or even surviving?

No doubt police and security forces help to stem the tide of mass attacks to some degree, but still, why aren't there more attacks in general against vulnerable targets? I really think the threat is exaggerated, particularly outside of conflict areas.

[salm]

Yeah, the threat is probably overstated.

Even if bridges are monitored and if monitoring made it impossible to throw stuff from bridges it would still be easy to cause desasters on roads and rails with minimum effort. Just drop a whole bunch of caltrops on roads. That can be done from any place that has access to the road. A big crash closes down a road for quite a while. If you have a sufficient amount of terrorists who do this on a regular basis you could at least sting the economy quite a bit.

But probably there just aren´t enough terrorists around.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

You have to splice out the electric current in the rails before you make a break. Even the Russian railroads do this, you run a low-grade current through the track and if the current is broken by a break in the rail, it triggers a warning which snaps the lights red for that operating block. So it's not so easy as just taking out a rail. Also the Russian rail cars are wider than American ones and consequently more stable so there's a better chance of their remaining upright during a derailment--only three cars were involved in the derailment, and one saw no injuries.

The only way to prevent this, would be to run trains with a string of empty flats out ahead of the engine, at speeds slow enough (like, 10 - 20 km/h ) so they could stop when the flats triggered the torpedo (it's traditional to call a bomb on the tracks a torpedo, for various reasons). The problem with this is of course you can't run a high speed express like this. The alternative is to do regular track patrols with road-railer trucks with some simple bomb detecting gear.

Thing is, there's no guarantee it was actually a torpedo on the tracks. They might have physically mounted a bomb under a carriage in a maintenance yard on a timer, since I seriously doubt security is that good there, and if it was, it could be bribed.

[Quetzalcoatl]

I wonder how Vymepl feels about all this, and more importantly, who is responsible. Between the Chechens,the Dagestani insurgents, and the Ingushetniks Russia has plenty of suspects to choose. I have a gut-feeling it's the Chechens. The whole double-IED thing is really their MO (although it's certainly been picked up by other groups).
Also, CMIIW, but didn't similar attacks happen a couple of years earlier?

A classic example from about 6 (-ish) years ago:
-Graphic (but no visible corpses) and probably NSFW-

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=749_1182024637

[Simon_Jester]

I think the question of "why don't terrorists do more of this kind of thing?" is interesting.

My speculation is that the kind of people who get worked up enough against "the system," "the West," "the oppressors," or the like don't really think in those terms. Cold blooded strategic planning is the province of people who can keep their heads when contemplating mass death, who don't react to the idea with either panic or glee. Many terrorists will be on the "glee" side of the scale: they're looking for ways to kill, and kill visibly, not just to cause damage and put grit in the gears of their enemy's civilization.

Also, terrorism is generally violence with a political goal, and having a seemingly random disaster occur doesn't always bring you closer to your goal. A terrorist needs the public to see him as something different than the common run of criminal, or they will simply strengthen internal policing without launching the kind of massive hamhanded reaction that terrorists rely on to gain support for their cause.

[Sea Skimmer]

You have to splice out the electric current in the rails before you make a break. Even the Russian railroads do this, you run a low-grade current through the track and if the current is broken by a break in the rail, it triggers a warning which snaps the lights red for that operating block. So it's not so easy as just taking out a rail.

Bridging the gap with wire would take perhaps 20 seconds; it is not a serious impediment to sabotage at all as seen by the intentional derailment of the Sunset Limited back in 1995 in the US. Using continuously welded rail is better if still very limited protection. In all reality if someone wants to derail a train nothing will stop them except to build outposts within line of sight of each other along the entire track. Even if the rail were immune to breaking you could still do something like undermining a series of cross ties and let it bend out of place.

The real reason terrorists don’t go after targets like these more are because the terrorists know such minor attacks are pointless. They lack any specific political or economic meaning and have a minimal shock effect against public opinion, an effect which is lessened all the more with each minor attack. Terrorist aim to be spectacular like massacring 300 schoolchildren in one go because it’s not like they can actually win by merely accumulating damage and dead bodies in many attacks. Course this also all goes back to the fact that terrorist campaigns have about a 99% failure rate and are in most cases more then futile.

[Teebs]

My own guess on why terrorists don't target railways or motorways with minor attacks is that the chances of them being caught when they make an attack would be pretty high because of the level of effort put into finding them and such. This means a terrorist basically gets to do one attack even if they're not going for a suicide bombing. Given that they get one chance, they want to go for a big dramatic target rather than a minor one.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Well, there was that train bombing in Mumbai and London some years ago. If they wanted to get maximum effect, they'd bomb the subway during the peak hours.

[Sea Skimmer]

The mid 2000s Mumbai, London and Madrid train attacks are perfect examples of what I mean, in all those cases the terrorists used a number of near simultaneous bombing (no less then 7 in Mumbai in 2006) attacks to create a huge spectacle and massive numbers of killed and wounded. They didn’t just randomly blow one bomb on one train every week for weeks on end, as might be easier to accomplish but much less effective at making a statement. Which tactic is truly more effective is open to debate but right now terrorists in the world operating outside of open war zones (Iraq and Afghanistan, and even then what I say is still somewhat true) are fixated on big attacks.

[Ma Deuce]

The only way to prevent this, would be to run trains with a string of empty flats out ahead of the engine, at speeds slow enough (like, 10 - 20 km/h ) so they could stop when the flats triggered the torpedo (it's traditional to call a bomb on the tracks a torpedo, for various reasons). The problem with this is of course you can't run a high speed express like this. The alternative is to do regular track patrols with road-railer trucks with some simple bomb detecting gear.

That'll work only if the "torpedo" is triggered by the train running over it, and not remotely by cell phone like the garden variety roadside IED.

[Darth Wong]

The real reason terrorists don’t go after targets like these more are because the terrorists know such minor attacks are pointless. They lack any specific political or economic meaning and have a minimal shock effect against public opinion, an effect which is lessened all the more with each minor attack. Terrorist aim to be spectacular like massacring 300 schoolchildren in one go because it’s not like they can actually win by merely accumulating damage and dead bodies in many attacks. Course this also all goes back to the fact that terrorist campaigns have about a 99% failure rate and are in most cases more then futile.

Terrorist campaigns have a 99% failure rate? How is this established? Don't ethnic or political groups which use terrorism often achieve at least some of their goals?

[open_sketchbook]

Typically, terror campaigns don't achieve goals so much as prevent your opponent from achieving all of theirs. Terror campaigns don't really get stuff done for you; they just create an environment where it is difficult for others to enact their agendas.

Setting bombs on railroads doesn't make people enact the laws you want, for example, but it can cause a breakdown of order that prevents any laws from being enforced. It's hard to scare people into doing things, it's very easy to scare people into not doing things.

[Darth Wong]

Typically, terror campaigns don't achieve goals so much as prevent your opponent from achieving all of theirs. Terror campaigns don't really get stuff done for you; they just create an environment where it is difficult for others to enact their agendas.

Setting bombs on railroads doesn't make people enact the laws you want, for example, but it can cause a breakdown of order that prevents any laws from being enforced. It's hard to scare people into doing things, it's very easy to scare people into not doing things.

What if that is your agenda? I don't believe terror groups typically have a well-formed agenda at all. Like right-wing militia nutjobs in the US right now, they don't really know what they want. They only know what they hate.

[Sea Skimmer]

Terrorist campaigns have a 99% failure rate? How is this established? Don't ethnic or political groups which use terrorism often achieve at least some of their goals?

I’m hard pressed to think of any example in which terrorism has worked actually within the last 150 years, except for a period of success by Pablo Escobar, which ended when the Columbian government took off the gloves, used his own tactics against him and then splattered his brains across a rooftop. And hell even then all Escobar got was his precious ban on extradition, something which had widespread support for other reasons, and which many nations have independent of any terrorist campaigns. But it did him no good in the end at all anyway.

I discount any examples older then that because the fact is the world simply operated under different rules and slaughtering civilians was normal anyway. The starting 150 year old example would be the KKK, and while they managed to kill a fair number of people in the end they got broken up, then after turning to political means accomplished far more with jim crow laws then they did with open violence.

At best it’s been an ajunt to successful insurgencies which had widespread support and thousands of armed fighters who can actually take to the streets and give battle. Its basically a delaying tactic. Such tactics are a vital part of militarily strategies… but they don’t do a damn thing when you have nothing else. Each attack merely hardens public resolve against future attacks. Thus the need for spectacular events each of increasing scale, as Al-Qaeda very well understood

Bombings-arsons-assassinations-sabotage as a means of attempting to alter national policy by a small minority group just doesn’t work. While in some cases terrorist groups have had certain goals accomplished while they still exist as organizations, usually that is because those goals were actually reasonable things that would have happened anyway and which are in many cases actually delayed by the terrorist campaign, like say the power sharing government in Northern Ireland. And hell even that is a full terrorist failure since the IRA always wanted unity with the rest of Ireland, not a stronger local government that London can still pull the plug on at any time it chooses.

Meanwhile it’s easy to find cases in which terrorism has backfired enormously, like the Moscow apartment bombings which killed hundreds in 1999, and caused the Russian government to blast the crap out of Chechnya and destroy any pretext of independence it ever had. Now all the same band of assholes can manage is derailing a train, vs. fielding tanks and artillery and armed helicopters. Heck Oklahoma City destroyed the militia movement in the US, even though most of it never even had terrorist leanings in the first place. Terrorist certainly did the Tamale Tigers no good either, and it was a huge factor in why the Anbar Awakening could take hold in Iraq even when US troops killed hoards of civilians as well. In those cases the terrorists actually had the aid of large conventional and convetionalish forces too.

This really should be no surprise. If massive bombing raids involving thousands of aircraft didn’t break public moral or government resolve, nor did a single atomic bomb, then how the hell is blowing up a train going to do anything? That’s why I’m glad someone (I forget who and it doesn’t matter) invoked Churchill’s old line from the height of the blitz after the 2005 bombings. "London can take it.

[FSTargetDrone]

Look at the agenda behind the shootings by the recently-executed John A. Muhammad and his young accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo. During the trial, Malvo said:

...their aim was to create havoc to cover for Mr. Muhammad's plans to kidnap his three children. The longer-term goal, Mr. Malvo testified, was to extort law enforcement to stop the killing, after which Mr. Muhammad would take the money and move to Canada with Mr. Malvo and the three children. There, Mr. Malvo said, Mr. Muhammad planned to create a training ground for 140 young homeless men whom he would send out to wreak similar havoc and to "shut things down" in cities across the United States.

This was 2 people using an old car and a single rifle. It was by no means a sophisticated series of attacks using explosives or whatnot. The guy was evidently patient as he hid in the trunk of the car and fired out through a small hole. It caused havoc over a period of about 2 months, resulting in 10 people dead. There was even a message relayed to the community by Muhammad that, "Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time."

Now, was this an act of terrorism? I think you could call it such. Muhammad had some relatively lofty (and hopeless) goals of forming a small army of people to spread his havoc, but what he did accomplish (admittedly small-scale, relatively speaking), was enough to frighten the public at large for many weeks. It seems like this sort of thing could happen even more frequently and perhaps more easily than various bombings or mass-killings that happen during a single incident involving a group of gunmen and the like. But they don't. Why aren't there more copy-cats?

[Simon_Jester]

Now, was this an act of terrorism? I think you could call it such. Muhammad had some relatively lofty (and hopeless) goals of forming a small army of people to spread his havoc, but what he did accomplish (admittedly small-scale, relatively speaking), was enough to frighten the public at large for many weeks. It seems like this sort of thing could happen even more frequently and perhaps more easily than various bombings or mass-killings that happen during a single incident involving a group of gunmen and the like. But they don't. Why aren't there more copy-cats?

Probably because there aren't that many people who are disturbed enough to believe that they, personally, have the power to start a mass terrorist movement, without being disturbed enough to want to do something dramatic that gets them shut down quickly.

[K. A. Pital]

How would you defend against this kind of thing? I can't see an economical way to secure all of the railroad right of ways.

Put the Russian police back to work and root out the corruption. That would lower the terrorists' ability to travel through the nation so easily. Of course, would require a fair deal of reforms in society. Probably it will have to become more opressive, kinda like China (how many railroad bombings has China had, I can't recall?).

[ray245]

How would you defend against this kind of thing? I can't see an economical way to secure all of the railroad right of ways.

Put the Russian police back to work and root out the corruption. That would lower the terrorists' ability to travel through the nation so easily. Of course, would require a fair deal of reforms in society. Probably it will have to become more opressive, kinda like China (how many railroad bombings has China had, I can't recall?).

There are a fair number of bus bombings if I recall things correctly.

[K. A. Pital]

There was a number of bus bombings in Russia as well; but a string of effective train and house bombings happened exclusively here. I may be wrong though.