Four Armenians Among Injured in Moscow Blast

YEREVAN (RFE/RL)—Official reports from Moscow indicate that four people with Armenian last names were among the injured in Monday’s deadly blast at the Domodedovo airport.
Citing “preliminary data,” the Armenian Foreign Ministry said several hours after the blast that there are no Armenian citizens among the dead. This was confirmed by the official list of 25 victims released by the Russian authorities on Tuesday. They said nine other people killed by the still unknown suicide bomber have not been identified yet.
Meanwhile, Armenia’s top leaders on Tuesday expressed shock and indignation at a suicide bomb attack killed at least 35 people and injured more than a hundred others at a Moscow airport on Monday.
President Serzh Sarkisian and Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian also offered their condolences to the families of the victims in separate letters to their Russian counterparts.
“I am deeply shocked and outraged by information about the bloody act of terror at the Domodedovo airport that took the lives of several dozen innocent people,” Serzh Sarkisian wrote to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
“I am confident that the measures taken [by the Russian authorities] will enable you to identify and punish the guilty and to prevent such crimes in the future,” he said.
“We are shocked and outraged by that bloody crime,” Tigran Sarkisian told Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians live in Moscow and the Russian North Caucasus, the main targets of bomb attacks by Islamist militants operating in Chechnya and elsewhere in the restive region.
Four Armenians were among 16 people killed in a powerful explosion that ripped through a busy market in Vladikavkaz, the capital of the Russian republic of North Ossetia, last September. One of them was an Armenian citizen.
In Yerevan, meanwhile, the Armenian government’s Civil Aviation Department said the deadly blast did not disrupt the busy flight service between Yerevan and Domodedovo and Moscow’s two other international airports. “There were no changes in today’s or yesterday’s flight schedule connected with the Domodedovo explosion,” Nelli Cherchinian, a spokeswoman for the department, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service.
Both she and a representative of the national airline Armavia also said that no Armenians planning to travel to the Russian capital have returned their tickets for fear of more terror attacks there. “Flights are carried out as planned. None of them has been delayed to cause panic,” said Cherchinian.
Early in the afternoon, the arrivals section of Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport was full of people waiting for an incoming flight from Domodedovo. “Of course, I’m worried,” said one elderly man. “My son is coming to Yerevan with my grandson today. They may have traveled yesterday and risked their life.”