Russia train disaster was terrorist attack: official

RUSSIA:  A train disaster that killed more than 39 people and injured 100 was caused by a bomb, indicating it was a terrorist attack, the head of Russia's FSB domestic intelligence service said on Saturday.

The alleged attack on an upscale passenger train speeding through the forest from Moscow to Saint Petersburg mangled and overturned carriages across the tracks and down the railway embankment as scores of orange-vested rescue workers searched urgently for further victims that could be trapped under the wreckage.

The incident occurred late Friday and targeted the same train hit by a bomb attack in August 2007 that injured dozens of passengers, and officials said they believed the latest incident was also caused by a bomb.

"Operational-investigative teams are treating as their main theory the detonation of an unidentified device by unidentified persons," Vladimir Yakunin, head of the state firm Russian Railways, said earlier on television.

"To put it simply, a terrorist attack," Yakunin said.

Witnesses including passengers on the train and inhabitants living near the site said they heard a loud bang just before the train went off the rails and police told AFP at the site there was a large crater under the track.

An unnamed security official quoted by the Interfax news agency said the crater was around one meter (three feet) in diameter.

A blast along the track in the 2007 attack ripped out a long segment of rail, causing the train to careen off the tracks.

The crater could have been caused by an "explosion from a device placed underneath one of the wagons," the RIA-Novosti news agency quoted another security official as saying.

There were conflicting reports on the death toll, but Alexander Basulin, an official at the emergency situations ministry, was quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency as saying "in all, there are 39" dead.

Basulin said this number comprised 25 victims found immediately and another 14 people discovered later, outside the train carriages.
Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said 95 people were injured and hospitalized.