Russian Mafia Blamed For Bombings

Bomb attacks blamed on criminal turf battles hit two Russian cities Monday, killing at least three people in a nation jittery after a string of deadly, unsolved blasts.

Police said there was no apparent link between the two explosions Monday, in an outdoor market in the industrial city of Ryazan and an elite boutique in St. Petersburg. And there was no suggestion of a terrorist act. Instead, police blamed them on organized crime, which has become entrenched throughout Russia.

The first bomb ripped through a meat stall in the morning in Ryazan, 120 miles south of Moscow, damaging other meat and vegetable stands and shattering glass in nearby apartment buildings. Cases of burst ketchup bottles and overturned produce scales littered the market square after the blast.

Two female vendors were killed immediately, and an unidentified man died of injuries later in the hospital, emergency officials said. Eleven people were injured, NTV television reported.

"I was buying something, standing about five meters (yards) away, I turned around and there was an explosion," a dazed-looking man told state-controlled ORT television. ORT said the explosion was the equivalent of 300 grams of TNT.

The bomb was in a plastic bag placed on the corrugated metal roof of the meat stall, witnesses said. The bomb exploded when a saleswoman tried to move it, NTV quoted a witness as saying.

Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo said a gang of Afghan war veterans and a rival group from Russia's Caucasus region were competing to control a protection racket in the market. Most Russian outdoor markets pay protection to criminal gangs, and bombings and contract killings are common.

Police detained five people for questioning shortly after the blast, said Interior Ministry spokesman Yevgeny Ryabtsev.

Another small explosion destroyed the windows of a clothing boutique in the northern city of St. Petersburg, but nobody was hurt. A police spokesman in St. Petersburg also blamed the incident on organized crime.

Rushailo dismissed the possibility that the blasts were terrorist attacks carried out by Chechen rebels.

"This situation doesn't have any relation to terror in the widely understood sense. This was a local conflict," he told journalists.

The explosions Monday came as residents of the southern city of Buinaksk mourned on the one-year anniversary of an apartment bombing that killed 64 people. Officials blamed that and three similar blasts around Russia last September on Chechen rebels, and Russian troops soon moved into breakaway Chechnya. But police have yet to prove who was responsible.

Monday's blasts also came less than a month after a bomb ripped through a busy underground passageway in Moscow, killing 12 people. That blast remains unsolved.

©2000 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed