NEW THEORY FLOATED ON GROZNY BOMBING.

The Moscow daily Novye Izvestia suggested on January 22 that one of Russia’s security agencies might be responsible, indeed, might have conducted the December 27 truck bombing of the Grozny headquarters of the Moscow-appointed administration for Chechnya. The paper cited a previous statement from the pro-Moscow Chechen Interior Minister Ruslan Tsakaev that the three suicide bombers did not look like Chechens and spoke accent-free Russian, and hypothesized that they might have been Russian troops deliberately misled by their own commanders. The bombers, thinking that they were simply conducting a training exercise, might not have known about the explosives on the vehicles they were driving. One possible purpose of such a Russian-directed attack, according to this theory, might have been to destroy evidence of misallocation of federal subsidies designated for rebuilding Chechnya’s shattered economic infrastructure.