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Showing posts with label Dagestan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dagestan. Show all posts

Thursday, 14 July 2011

Suspected Minsk Metro Bomber detained in violent Confrontation with Police

Viktor Dvorakovskii, an ethnic Russian Wahhabist convert and prime suspect for the 11 April bombing of the Oktiabr'skaia Minsk Metro station, has been arrested in the settlement of Inozemtsevo in the southern Russian district of Stavropol. The 23-year-old Dvorakovskii, who was born in Dagestan in the city of Makhachkala, became a convert to ‘radical Islam’ at the age of 20, and has been evading the Russian special services since they began searching for him in March after he accidentally blew up his own flat with an improvised explosive device. His wife and three-year-old child were in the flat at the time and were wounded.

Viktor Dvorakovskii: the Minsk Metro Bomber?
(Picture: Itar-TASS)


According to Izvestiia, last night’s detention of Dvorakovskii occurred quite by chance when a local police patrol spotted a man behaving in a suspicious manner who then attempted to hide himself in some bushes next to a kindergarten. Upon being asked for his identity documents, he threatened to blow up the police and promptly threw a bomb at them which landed to the side of the group concussing one of the officers. The patrol opened fire and a second device exploded blowing off Dvorakovskii’s right hand. A local resident told reporters how she heard Dvorakovskii yell “Allahu Akbar” before the sounds of two detonations rent the night air. At the time of writing, the latest reports stated that he lay comatose in hospital, bearing wounds sustained from the second bomb blast and a number of small-arms rounds. What was left of his right hand was amputated by surgeons.

At the time of his arrest it was thought that Dvorakovskii was planning an imminent suicide attack, albeit a relatively small-scale one. Recently, it had been thought that he was already dead, following a suicide bombing in Makhachkala on 10 May this year. This took place in similar circumstances to last night’s encounter, with a police patrol happening upon a man “acting suspiciously” who then detonated an explosive device killing one of the officers. Dvorakovskii, who is reported as having received paramilitary training alongside other jihadists in the northern Caucasus, is also said to have had links with a number of other perpetrators of Islamic terrorist acts in Russia, including another ethnic Russian Wahhabist – Vitalii Razdobud’ko – who was responsible for the Domodedovo Airport bombing as well as a double suicide bombing alongside his wife in Gubden, Dagestan on 14 February this year. This bombing killed three policemen and wounded 26 others. Razdobud’ko, his wife Maria Khoresheva and a number of others, had also been involved in a foiled plot to bomb multiple targets in Moscow this past New Year’s Eve.

The cases of Dvorakovskii, Razdobud’ko and his wife illustrate that what lies at the root of Muslim terrorism is Islamic doctrine, not the straw men of ‘racism’ and ‘relative deprivation’ which the British mainstream media routinely wheel out by way of ‘explanation’. It is depressing that ethnic Russians find themselves under attack from this common threat, but if Dvorakovskii was indeed responsible for the Minsk bombing, it is good news indeed that he has been apprehended and now lies in a coma. The members of the Russian police patrol who tackled him must be congratulated for their bravery. May they have every success in hunting down and eliminating all others who follow this vicious jihadist ideology.

Monday, 5 April 2010

Russia: Nazran Suicide Bomb Attack

Russia today witnessed its fifth bombing in a little over a week, with a double bomb attack upon a police station in Nazran in the North Caucasian Republic of Ingushetia. This time it was a suicide bomber who struck first followed by a car bomb, the attack closely resembling last week’s bombing of another police station in Kizlyar Dagestan where a car bomb was followed a few minutes later by a suicide attack. Yesterday another blast took place, derailing a freight train in Dagestan but fortunately causing no fatalities. Latest reports suggest that two police officers were killed and another two injured in the Nazran incident.

Dokku Umarov, a Chechen Islamist who wishes to establish an Islamic Emirate in the Northern Caucaus, Krasnodar Krai, Astrakhan and the Volga Region, claimed responsibility for the recent Moscow Metro bombings and warned that there would be many more to come. It is probable that his followers were behind today’s attack. In the immediate period following the fall of the USSR, terrorist attacks upon Russian civilians and infrastructure targets were justified by the perpetrators in the name of Chechen independence, but in recent years this has been supplanted by a drift towards an espousal of Salafist jihadism. Clearly, the Islamists are turning up the heat in Russia, so expect more of the same in the weeks ahead and beyond. Reports on today’s and yesterday’s bombings can be accessed in the videos below.



Wednesday, 31 March 2010

Kizlyar Bombings: Salafists Suspected

Bombers have struck in the town of Kizlyar in Dagestan. All together, 12 fatalities have been reported as well as 23 injured. Apparently a crowd had gathered after the first bomb had exploded, only for a suicide bomber dressed as a policeman to rush in amongst them about twenty minutes later and detonate a device. The Voice of Russia reports that the Dagestani Interior Minister (identified as Dagestan’s President by Izvestiia) – Ali Magomedov – has stated that one of the bombers has already been identified, but no further details were forthcoming.

Coming as this did so quickly upon the heels of the bombings in the Moscow Metro, people will be speculating as to whether there was a specific link between the two. It is often said that such acts have been linked primarily to the struggle of Russia’s North Caucasian republics to achieve full independence, but others point to the internationalisation of Al-Qaeda style jihadism and its particular appeal to many young Muslim males in the area. This latter position is certainly the view of Novaia gazeta’s Iuliia Latynina, who argues that the emergence of jihadi ideology in the region over the past twenty years rests upon the idea that this is Muslim land that needs to be reclaimed for the Dar al-Islam. This is why, she argues, most terrorist bombings in Russia over the past 15 years have been centred in the Northern Caucasus and adjacent regions. Salafism has taken root, and it would seem that once again it is jihadis who have wrought their terrible and pointless work in Kizlyar.