Explosion rocks Moscow's Domodedovo Airport: At least 35 reported dead in suspected suicide bombing

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Explosion rocks Moscow's Domodedovo Airport: At least 35 reported dead in suspected suicide bombing

 

By Doak Jantzen, Alex Galkin and Corky Siemaszko

NY DAILY NEWS WRITERS

 

Monday, January 24th 2011

 

 

A suicide bomber packing powerful explosives waded into a baggage area at Moscow's busiest airport and set off a deafening blast Monday that massacred almost three dozen people and wounded 130 more.

 

In the aftermath, blood and body parts littered the Domodedovo Airport terminal and the smoke was so thick Russian rescue workers needed flashlights to search the shrapnel-shredded bodies laying near a baggage carousel.

 

"There is a mountain of human remains," Ilya Likhtenfeld, who operates a business at the airport, posted on Twitter. "Nobody is touching that yet."

 

Russian TV upped the death toll to 35 and reported that 130 people were wounded by a bomb that was packed "full of metal pieces" and as powerful as 15 to 22 pounds of TNT.

 

Moscow's chief prosecutor called the deadly blast a terrorist attack. And while no group claimed credit for the attacks, suspicions fell on Chechen warlord Doku Umarov who has vowed to take the long-running war for independence to the Russian capital.

 

Meanwhile, investigators were looking for three men in connection with the attack.

 

"Those responsible for the explosion will be tracked down and punished," Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said.

 

President Obama also condemned the "outrageous act of terrorism against the Russian people."

 

Domodedovo was packed with travelers at 4:37 p.m. local time when the bomb-carrying intruder wormed into the crowd waiting at the international baggage claim area - and set off the blast, Russian media reported.

 

Seconds later, smoke filled the area and panicked people - some stunned and bleeding - raced for the exits. A bloody police officer staggered outside screaming, "I survived! I survived!"

 

"I was sitting near a café reading a newspaper when I heard a sound of an explosion as if a fireworks was going off, which seemed very strange to me given that it is an airport," witness Sergei Glokhov told The Los Angeles Times.

 

"Then people began screaming and running and I saw a man who was wiping blood pouring from his head over his eyes with one hand and trying to make a telephone call with the other."

 

Another witness named Mark Green told the BBC he had just arrived in Moscow and was walking out of the arrivals area when "there was this almighty explosion, a huge bang."

 

"My colleague and I looked at each other and said, Christ that sounds like a car bomb or something, because the noise was, literally, it shook you," the British businessman said.

 

Airport officials immediately redirected international flights to other Moscow airports while more than 20 emergency rescue units descended on Domodedovo.

 

It was the worst terrorist attack since March 2010, when two female suicide bombers from the separatist Dagetan region set off blasts in the city subway that killed 40 people.

 

Experts said whoever was behind Monday's massacre exploited a weakness in the airport security - people collecting international arrivals from the luggage area don't go through the same strict level of screenings that departing passengers do.

 

In 2004, Islamic militants bribed their way on to two planes flying out of Domodedovo and brought both of them down, killing 90 people.

 

Some 20 million passengers passed through Domodedovo last year, officials said."

[Lexington Av Local]

Bad move on the part of the extremists...Russia isn't exactly a country you wanna piss off.

[KTrainExp]

This is a disgrace. If you have problems with your government or any government, you shouldn't take it out on innocent civilians.

[Olegkha]

...

Experts said whoever was behind Monday's massacre exploited a weakness in the airport security - people collecting international arrivals from the luggage area don't go through the same strict level of screenings that departing passengers do.

"

 

I keep saying that for years !

We have the same problem here ! in JFK , LGA and EWR, except not international flight but domestic flight

[Messino]

Chechnya FTW!:mad:

[Roadcruiser1]

See this is the 21st Century. Why can't people just talk instead of fight. At least don't take it out on innocent people like what some people here say. Fight a Revolutionary War, and take out military targets. That what America did, and we got ourselves a nation.

[Messino]

See this is the 21st Century. Why can't people just talk instead of fight. At least don't take it out on innocent people like what some people here say. Fight a Revolutionary War, and take out military targets. That what America did, and we got ourselves a nation.

 

The simple answer is they are muslims...The Chechans are muslims, they dont have much money or military strength so they resort to terrorism.

[Nova RTS 9147]

See this is the 21st Century. Why can't people just talk instead of fight?

 

We spent the better part of our (human) existence trying to kill each other, and devising even better/faster ways of killing more of each other. We got so entrenched in the habit of just bigger and more devastating murder that we simply don't have the complete capacity to engage each other on equal terms.

 

Long into short: because we don't know any better.

[EliteOperator81]

Infowars.com -- latest updates

[TheKorean]

The simple answer is they are muslims...The Chechans are muslims, they dont have much money or military strength so they resort to terrorism.

 

These people are not well educated. they are ignorant and stupid.

[Roadcruiser1]

Then you guys are suggesting we should ethnically kill these people, because from what some of you are saying these Muslims are all stupid, barbaric, and deserves to be killed off.

[GojiMet86]

These people are not well educated. they are ignorant and stupid.

 

The terrorist groups are the uneducated ones. Muslims as a whole are intelligent.

 

Then you guys are suggesting we should ethnically kill these people, because from what some of you are saying these Muslims are all stupid, barbaric, and deserves to be killed off.

 

I think that's what's on their minds. Unfortunately, ethnic cleansing against Muslims has been done before, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. And these places are in Europe, not the Middle East.

[TheKorean]

Yea I meant the terrorists.

[IRT Bronx Express]

Well, more metal detectors inside the airports... if that even works.

[Roadcruiser1]

I am not being mean, but I think some people here want to kill the Muslim population. Since I do have a clean view I don't think that is right, and I won't participate in any activity that is similar to Hilter's. I also believe that hurting or killing innocent people is wrong, and it just hurts mankind as a whole. Let me quote from Carl Sagan from the photo the "Pale Blue Dot" a photo of Earth taken at 3.7 billion miles away from earth.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

 

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

 

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

 

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

 

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.