MOSCOW — Heavily armed gunmen burst into the Parliament building of Chechnya, in southern Russia, on Tuesday morning, killing at least three people and wounding more than a dozen before the assailants were killed by police officers or by their own explosives, officials said.
The assailants, including one suicide bomber, sprayed automatic rifle fire and set off at least one explosion in one of the most brazen assaults in some time in Chechnya, a region in the volatile North Caucasus where violence linked to a simmering Islamist insurgency is common.
The police were able to prevent the militants from reaching Parliament members’ chambers, investigators said, though the men were able to barricade themselves on the first floor and open fire.
Investigators said three gunmen drove through the front gates of the Parliament complex, in a busy section of downtown Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. Without uttering a word, they killed two police officers standing guard at the entrance, said Alvi Karimov, the press secretary for Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s leader. One militant then blew himself up, killing a staff member, Karimov said. The force of the blast blew out windows and wounded several others.
Russian TV showed panicked workers, some with wounds, stumbling past corpses to flee the Parliament grounds, while heavily armored police officers in helmets and bulletproof jackets raced in.
All members of Parliament were evacuated, though at least 17 people, including six police officers, were wounded in the attack, which ended when special forces units killed the remaining militants.
No one immediately took responsibility for the attack, though it bore all the hallmarks of similar violence carried out by the region’s Islamist insurgents. An embattled, though still potent, force, the insurgency arose from the remains of a fierce separatist movement that kept Russian forces at bay during nearly a decade of intermittent war in Chechnya that began in the mid-1990s.
At a parliamentary session in Grozny held later Tuesday despite the attacks, Kadyrov accused the insurgents of seeking to spread “chaos and anarchy” through the region.
“Today’s incident shows once again that these remaining gangs are truly devils,” he said in remarks posted on his website. “They have no humanity and have nothing in common with Islam. They are not human beings.”
Tuesday’s attack echoed a raid by militants in August on Tsentoroi, Kadyrov’s home village. More than a dozen people were killed in that attack, including several civilians, according to Russian news media reports.
