Mozdok (Russia), Aug 03: More than a thousand rescuers continued early today to remove the rubble of a Russian military hospital after a second night of relentless work, in a desperate search for survivors of a suicide attack that has claimed at least 49 lives. Rescue workers early today discovered five more bodies amid the debris of the hospital, the head of the Russian emergencies ministry's crises department said.
This brought the number of people killed in Friday's attack in southern Russia to at least 49, a news agency quoted General Sergei Salov as saying.
Around 1,300 volunteers and rescuers worked to remove the debris, taking five-minute breaks every hour to listen for voices of people still believed to be trapped. Authorities, meanwhile, detained the head of the hospital in southern Russia, accusing him of "criminal negligence" in the Friday evening strike on the facility, which had treated Russian soldiers hurt in the guerrilla war with Chechen separatist rebels.
Mozdok is a military nerve center of the four-year Russian military campaign in predominantly Muslim Chechnya, and authorities have blamed the attack on Chechen extremists.
President Vladimir Putin yesterday sent a letter of condolence to the victims' families that gave no hint that the military campaign was about to end. "The terrorists will not be able to dictate their criminal ways upon us," an official Kremlin statement quoted Putin as saying.
"Their bloody crimes will not end the political peace process," said Putin. Bureau Report