TOLYATTI, Russia (AFP) — A powerful bomb ripped through a bus at rush hour in the southern Russian city of Tolyatti on Wednesday killing eight people and wounding 50, prosecutors said.
Local Governor Vladimir Artyakov said a terrorism investigation had been opened after the explosion and he briefed President Vladimir Putin on the emergency measures being taken.
The blast struck residents heading to work and to nearby university buildings early in the morning at a busy junction in the centre of the city, which is synonymous with Russia's car industry.
"The driver stopped at a red light and just then everything exploded. The doors blew out and we went with them," Viktor Vasilyev, who was travelling to work on the bus, told Channel One television. "We had to crawl away."
Fragments of glass and metal scattered far from the green bus and the shock wave blew out the windows of a residential block.
A witness quoted by Interfax described bodies being thrown from the bus, some shorn of their clothes and dismembered.
A spokesman for the prosecutor's office, Vladimir Markin, said on national television that eight people had been killed and 50 injured. A medical source said three children were among those hospitalised.
The majority of the victims were students of the nearby Tolyatti State University, news agencies reported.
Samara Region Governor Vladimir Artyakov, a former head of the sprawling car factory in Tolyatti, declared Thursday an official day of mourning in the region after visiting the injured in hospital, Interfax reported.
It was the second blast on a bus in Russia in just over a week, following an explosion that killed one person and wounded five in the turbulent province of Dagestan on October 23.
Investigators were trying to establish whether the bomb in Tolyatti, said by one law enforcement source to be equivalent to two kilogrammes (4.4 pounds) of TNT explosive, was brought onto the bus by a passenger, was fixed beneath it or had been laid in its path.
The head of the Samara branch of the FSB security service, Yury Rozhin, said that while terrorism was the most likely explanation, other possibilities included a purely criminal motive and an unintended blast caused by mishandling of explosives.
"One of the versions is that there was a suicide bomber on the bus," RIA Novosti news agency quoted Rozhin as saying.
While Russia continues to face insurgent violence in the mainly Muslim Caucasus mountain region on its southern border, such attacks are almost unheard of in Samara.
"There hasn't been anything of this sort in Samara province before," said Ivan Skrylnik, a spokesman for the governor's office, who played down the idea of a link to the type of guerrilla violence seen in the Caucasus.
Tolyatti is home to some 700,000 people and is best known for being the headquarters of AvtoVAZ, which makes the Lada, the iconic Soviet-era car, and is Russia's biggest automobile manufacturer.
Written "Tolyatti" in Russian, the city takes its name from Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti after whom it was renamed by the Soviet authorities in 1964.
The city has long had a reputation for organised crime and violent settling of scores between rival criminal groups.
One lawmaker linked the blast to Russia's forthcoming election season, in which parliamentary elections will be held in December and a presidential poll next March -- at which Putin is due to stand down.
In August, dozens of people were injured when a bomb blast derailed a Moscow-Saint Petersburg train.
"In the pre-election period attempts are being made to destabilise the situation in the regions. The main question is who gains from this," said Viktor Ilyukhin, a member of parliament, quoted by RIA Novosti.
Security forces threw a cordon around the site of Wednesday's blast.
Journalist Alexei Napylov told the independent Echo of Moscow radio station that police had detained several reporters for two hours after they tried to photograph the scene from a rooftop.
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