Islamic militants blamed in deadly November attack on Russian train

Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service, said explosive components recovered in the raid in the troubled Ingushetia province, located west of Chechnya, and DNA taken from the alleged rebels matched those found after the attack on the Nevsky Express train, which left 28 people dead and more than 90 others injured.

"These materials give grounds to presume that these very people were involved in that crime," he said, reporting that 10 militants were detained and eight killed in the operation Tuesday and Wednesday in the village of Ekazhevo, where police seized more than a ton of explosives and a large cache of guns.

Speaking in a televised meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev, Bortnikov said the group is also suspected in 15 other attacks, including bombings and the slaying of security officers.

Among those killed in the raid, he said, was Alexander Tikhomirov, a young preacher who had emerged as a major figure in the violent radical Muslim insurgency that has evolved from the Chechen separatist movement and spread across the mountains of Russia's southwest frontier.

Tikhomirov's death could represent an important victory for Russian forces in the North Caucasus, because he was considered an effective propagandist and seemed to play a key role in rallying the insurgency's ethnic and local factions around the goal of establishing a fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate.

A convert to Islam from Siberia who studied in Egypt and was thought to be in his late 20s, he had appeared in Internet videos taking credit for suicide attacks on the Ingush governor's motorcade and on a police station in Ingushetia's largest city, Nazran. The latter showed him sitting with what appeared to be a barrel of explosives, which he described as "a small present for our apostates and infidels."

Russia's security forces have a track record of prematurely confirming the elimination of rebel leaders in the North Caucasus, and Tikhomirov, better known in the region by the name Sayid Buryatsky, has been reported dead before. But Bortnikov said, "It has been proven with absolute certainty that this was him."

The authorities also said a local employee of the Russian treasury was killed in the raid and described him as "the bandit group's financier," underscoring widespread suspicions that the insurgency has been financed by the government's own funds, sometimes diverted by corrupt officials making protection payments to the rebels.