MOSCOW, Dec 28: Russian investigators on Saturday said they saw an Arab connection in a suicide bomb attack that struck at the heart of the pro-Moscow administration in Chechnya on Friday and left at least 55 people dead.

As rescue teams continued to search for survivors amid the debris of the Chechen government headquarters in Grozny, devastated in the attack, the emergency ministry said the death toll had risen to 55, with a further 123 injured.

The spokesman for the Russian military’s anti-terrorist unit in the Northern Caucasus, Ilya Shabalkin, said in an interview with the ITAR-TASS news agency that the attack was organized by rebel Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and an Arab mercenary, Abu-Tarik.

“A few days earlier we were tipped off about a forthcoming large-scale terrorist act to be carried out in Grozny by a group based in Stariye Atagi and headed by Abu-Tarik,” Shabalkin said.

In a military operation at Stariye Atagi, a village 20 kilometres south of Grozny that Shabalkin said was used as a base for terrorist activities, “we succeeded in killing Abu-Tarik but were unable to prevent the terrorist act”, the spokesman said.

The initial tipoff had concerned a meeting between the radical Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and another Arab, Abu al-Walid, Shabalkin said.

On Friday, Shabalkin said the attack was ordered by Basayev and al-Walid and financed by sources in several Arab countries which he did not name.

And on NTV television on Saturday he said Chechen fighters had begun “resorting to so-called Arab methods, in which suicide bombers attempt to penetrate areas where people are gathered and blow themselves up”.

Russian officials have sought to play up links between the radical Basayev and the elected rebel president Maskhadov, particularly during the Oct 23-26 Moscow theatre siege in which an armed Chechen group took 800 people hostage.

The foreign ministry said in a statement that the organizers of the Grozny attack were “part of the global terror network”, specifically referring to Al Qaeda.

But Andrei Piontkovsky of Moscow’s Center for Strategic Studies said this year’s death of Khattab, a Jordanian-born guerilla with alleged links to the Al Qaeda network, meant the Chechens had been forced to become far more self-reliant than in the past.

“This was the work of Arabs is a slogan that works well for the Russian propaganda machine,” he said.

“It may be partially true, but with the death of Khattab, the influence of Arabs (in the Chechen resistance) is diminishing.”—AFP