Explosion near Moscow subway station kills 10

MOSCOW – A woman strapped with explosives blew herself up outside a busy Moscow subway station Tuesday night, killing at least 10 people and wounding more than 50 in the second terrorist attack to hit Russia in a week, officials said.

Seven days earlier, almost to the hour, two Russian jetliners crashed within minutes of each other in what officials determined were terrorist bombings. All 90 people aboard were killed, and the investigation has focused on two Chechen women believed to have been passengers.

A militant Muslim Web site published a statement late Tuesday claiming responsibility for the subway bombing on behalf of the “Islambouli Brigades,” a group that also claimed it caused the jetliner crashes with suicide teams in retribution for Russia’s war with Islamic rebels in Chechnya.

Mayor Yuri Luzhkov told reporters near the Rizhskaya subway stop in northern Moscow that the bomber was walking toward the station shortly after 8 p.m. but turned around when she saw two police officers.

She “decided to destroy herself in a crowd of people” in a busy area between the subway station and a nearby department store-supermarket complex, Luzhkov said, adding that the bomb was packed with bolts and pieces of metal.

A spokesman for the Federal Security Service, Sergei Ignatchenko, told NTV television that the casualty toll had risen to 10 dead and 51 wounded, of whom 49 were hospitalized. Many of the injured were believed to be seriously wounded, and the death toll was expected to rise. It was not immediately clear if the number of dead included the bomber.

Chechen secessionists have been blamed for a series of attacks in Moscow and other parts of Russia the past several years, killing nearly 370 people with bombs in just the past 21 months.