Terrorism Russia

Russian commandos Tuesday shot to death a gunman who seized a bus 13 hours earlier to demand the release of jailed comrades. Two of the approximately 30 hostages on board were slightly injured by flying glass during the raid. Russian law enforcement officials identified the suspect as Sultan-Said Idiyev, a 34-year-old ethnic Chechen and former convict who was reportedly connected to a similar 1994 hijacking.

A blast that destroyed much of a nine-story Moscow apartment building Thursday, killing at least 47 people and burying dozens more under a pile of rubble, was caused by a bomb and is being investigated as a terrorist act that may be linked to Russia's war with Islamic separatists, authorities said. The explosion, which officials said was caused by a device on a lower floor, fueled widespread fear that the war against Islamic insurgents in the southern republic of Dagestan is spreading to Moscow.

On a chilly night last September, bus driver Alexei Kartofelnikov saw a suspicious car parked outside the 13-story apartment building where he lives in this working-class city. He called the police, who discovered three sacks of powder and a timing device in the basement. The sacks tested positive for explosives.

Paramilitary troops stormed a bus where gunmen were holding 18 people hostage in the volatile Caucasus on Thursday, freeing the captives, seizing the perpetrators and rectifying somewhat the image of Russia's anti-terrorist forces as bunglers. But the tense, daylong standoff in the republic of Dagestan, and several new incidents of insurgency in neighboring Chechnya, have served to remind the Kremlin of its unresolved conflicts with the restless regions of Russia's southern fringes.

International pressure is growing on Yasser Arafat to take tougher steps against Islamic militants as several countries expressed disappointment with the limited action he has taken in response to the recent surge of terrorist bombings in Israel. The United States, Russia, European states and key Arab nations are weighing in publicly and behind the scenes on the danger of Arafat's failure to launch a more robust crackdown. Secretary of State Colin L.

With horror comes a kind of fog. The few civilians left Sunday among the ruins of this Chechen capital's center seemed to be sleepwalking through a strange nightmare in which every store, every school, every home they once frequented has turned into a charred wreck. They wore white armbands in hopes of fending off snipers.

In his first meeting with a Western leader since he became acting president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin told British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Saturday that changes are possible in Moscow's policy on Chechnya. Speaking after informal talks at a seaside palace outside St. Petersburg, Putin did not specify what the changes could be. Russia has faced months of international criticism over alleged human rights abuses during its war in the separatist republic.

The pipe bomb exploded on U.S. soil but was felt in each of the 197 countries with athletes in Atlanta for the 1996 Olympic Games. World leaders, horrified and angry, called for tougher, united action against terrorism after the blast early Saturday during a rock concert in Centennial Olympic Park. "This repugnant violation of the spirit of the Olympic Games must be denounced around the world," U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said in a statement.

Asia Cambodia: A Texas woman and her Cambodian interpreter were killed and her husband was seriously wounded last week when Khmer Rouge guerrillas fired on their vehicle at the Angkor Wat temple complex, the Associated Press reported. The Americans were part of a four-van convoy of more than a dozen tourists and four policemen on an excursion to the famed archeological site 150 miles northwest of Phnom Penh, the capital.

Russian authorities said Friday that 140 people had been detained in southern Moscow on suspicion of involvement in an Islamic extremist organization, according to the state news agency. The Federal Security Agency said at least 30 of the suspects were citizens of other countries and some had ties to militants in the northern Caucasus, the state news agency, RIA Novosti, reported. It did not say which countries the detainees were from. The roundup came after two brothers of Chechen descent who grew up in Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan were named as suspects in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three people and wounded hundreds of others.