-Caveat Lector- Muslim warns of Moscow war Mark Franchetti Moscow WITH a bloody wave of terrorist bombings adding immeasurably to President Boris Yeltsin's political woes, a Muslim rebel leader has for the first time confirmed a link between one of the explosions in Moscow and Islamic separatists fighting the Russian army in Dagestan. Shamil Basayev, a veteran of the separatist war in Chechnya, has said comrades in arms from neighbouring Dagestan planted the first bomb that exploded in a shopping mall behind Red Square on August 31, killing one person and injuring 40. Since then nearly 300 people have died in four other bombings that have provoked fear and panic in the capital and plunged the country into the most menacing turmoil it has faced in the chaotic decade since communism's demise. On Friday, Moscow police named a Chechen, Achimes Gochiyayev, 29, as the head of the group responsible for the bombings. He is said to have rented space in the two blocks of flats bombed. To victims of the carnage it may no longer matter who was to blame. "I cannot describe the horror of it," said a Russian rescue worker fighting back tears at the scene of a blast on Monday in which 116 people, including several children, were killed in their sleep. To Kremlin leaders struggling for survival in the run-up to elections, however, the arrest of suspects has become as much of a political imperative as winning the war in Dagestan, where a rebel army led by Chechen guerrillas is fighting the Russian army. "These explosions will go on," Basayev is quoted as saying in Prague's Lidove Noviny, "because [Dagestani] people who had their relatives, mothers and children killed for nothing will kill out of revenge." His chilling warning coincided with reports from Dagestan that 1,500 rebels were massing for another attack on Russian forces this weekend, contradicting Moscow's much-trumpeted assurances that the "terrorists" were all but defeated. Yesterday the Russian air force pounded rebel positions inside Chechnya. An unconfirmed report said Russian motorised units had crossed into the breakaway republic, the first such incursion into Chechnya since 1996. The crisis, which threatens to embroil Russia's generals in a campaign as punishing as the ill-fated one in Chechnya in 1995, has revived widespread doubts about Yeltsin's fitness to govern, prompting rumours that he may soon resign - or offer a job to Alexander Lebed, the hulking former paratrooper turned politician whose mediation in the previous conflict is widely credited with having ended the bloodshed there. With parliamentary elections scheduled for December and the presidential election in June, Yuri Luzhkov, the ambitious mayor of Moscow, and Vladimir Putin, the latest in a long line of Russian prime ministers as Moscow has reeled from one crisis to another, have staked their political futures on solving the crisis. Yet in a city renowned for its love of conspiracy theories, they have struggled to reassure the public. Most Russians believe that the terror campaign is linked to Russia's long-running problems in the Caucasus region, the people of which are routinely blamed for the crime and chaos in Moscow. The three prime suspects named by Russian police are all of Muslim extraction. With Basayev's guerrillas - some of them linked to former Afghan rebels who humiliated the Soviet Red Army into retreating from Kabul - seeking to merge the Russian republics of Dagestan and neighbouring Chechnya into an independent Islamic state, Russian security forces had warned that rebels might bring their war to Moscow. Yet when the bombing began, it was wildly rumoured that Russian security forces might somehow be to blame. According to one unlikely theory, a power-crazed Yeltsin was eager for any pretext to impose a state of emergency and cancel elections. Basayev, a bearded Chechen warlord who is co-ordinating rebel operations in Dagestan, may have put such speculation to rest. He has long been a thorn in the side of the Kremlin, inspiring terror among the Russian troops routed in Chechnya. He famously humiliated Moscow by taking 1,200 hostages in southern Russia at the height of the Chechen war. Now he is fighting in Dagestan. Alongside him is Khattab, an Arab militant famed for a devastating mountain ambush he executed against a Russian military convoy in Chechnya in 1996. He takes no prisoners: more than 100 soldiers were killed, and video tapes of the attack were later sold in the markets of Grozny, the Chechen capital. Known as the "Black Arab", Khattab is widely suspected of having links with Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi dissident financier blamed for last year's bombings of American embassies in Africa. Russian intelligence sources suspect the hand of Bin Laden in the Dagestani rebel campaign and believe he may have helped to fund secret terrorist training camps in Chechnya. Khattab has denied responsibility for the blasts. But Basayev seemed eager to implicate his Dagestani associates, saying the bombings were carried out in revenge for Russian air raids on Dagestani villages. "What is the difference," he said, "between someone letting a bomb go off in the centre of Moscow and injuring 10 to 20 children and the Russians dropping bombs from their aircraft over the Dagestani village of Karamachi and killing 10 to 20 children?" The blasts have provoked deep insecurity among urban Russians. Some residents are sleeping in their cars for fear of being blown up in their beds. In apartment blocks, civil defence groups take turns to patrol stairwells and entrances round the clock. Graffiti urging citizens to "kill the blacks" - the Russian term for olive-skinned people from the Caucasus - have appeared in metro stations. Anatoli Tyazholov, the governor of the Moscow region surrounding the capital, has called for people from the Caucasus lacking proper registration papers to be rounded up in camps. None of it is any consolation to the victims - or the survivors. Semion Konyukhov's tragedy was the fate that spared him: he says he should have been killed at 5.30am on Monday, when the eight-storey building in which he lived was ripped apart by a powerful explosion. But in a gesture that will haunt him forever, he had swapped flats with Olga, his newly married daughter, to give her more room for her baby. She, her husband and Liza, the child, were killed, while Konyukhov survived. Such was the power of the blast, believed to have been caused by about 200kg of plastic explosives stored in a first- floor flat, Liza's little body was found 200 metres away from the building, lying in a children's sandpit where Konyukhov used to play with her every afternoon. Her parents were crushed in their bed. Such carnage has become disturbingly common for Moscow's residents: if Basayev's comments are a true indication of rebel intentions, the nightmare seems set to continue. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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