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34 Killed, 100 Wounded, in Russia's Dagestan Blast
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Putin
attends a ceremony marking the Soviet Union’s victory over
Nazi Germany in World War II
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MOSCOW,
May 9 (News Agencies) - At least 34 people were killed and more than
100 others wounded Thursday, May 9, when a bomb destroyed a military
bus in Kaspiysk, in the southern republic of Dagestan, the local
interior ministry said.
The
blast occurred around 9:45 am (0545 GMT) when a landmine targeted the
bus carrying an army brass band as a column of soldiers was passing
by, a ministry spokesman told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The
death toll was still rising as emergency services rushed the wounded
to hospital, he added.
The
mine was hidden in shrubbery around 300 meters (yards) from the town's
main square where a ceremony marking the 57th anniversary of Russia's
victory in World War II was about to be held, the emergencies ministry
said.
Most
of the dead and wounded were marines, but the victims also included
war veterans and children, Interfax reported.
A
50-meter-long stretch of Kaspiysk's Lenin street, where the bomb went
off, was stained with blood and strewn with fragments of brass band
instruments, witnesses said.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin immediately called an emergency meeting with
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and security service (FSB, ex-KGB)
chief Nikolai Patrushev to review the situation.
Moments
earlier, Putin and his colleagues had attended a Victory Day parade in
Moscow's Red Square, where the Kremlin boss warned that 21st-century
terrorism was "just as dangerous as Nazism" had been during
World War II.
"The
forces of evil and violence reappear again and again in the world.
Today they have other names and other habits, but they all also bring
death and destruction," Putin told the military parade of around
5,000 troops.
FSB
and military investigators rushed to the scene of the Kaspiysk blast
to search for clues about the terror attack which happened as the
military column was marching to the town's cemetery for a
wreath-laying ceremony.
Dagestan
borders the southern republic of Chechnya, where separatists have been
fighting Russian troops for 31 months in a war for independence.
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