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Saturday July 24, 2010

Bloomberg

Terror Attack Closes Russian Hydro Plant, Kills 2

July 21, 2010, 8:42 AM EDT

(Updates with plant halt in first paragraph.)

July 21 (Bloomberg) -- OAO RusHydro, Russia’s largest hydropower company, will halt its Baksanskaya plant in the North Caucasus for at least six weeks after an attack on the facility left two people dead.

A group of three to five people broke into the station, killed two guards and assaulted two workers before planting explosives on the premises, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office said today on its website. Four devices detonated and a fifth was defused, investigators said.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin put his deputy Igor Sechin in charge of overseeing the investigation and repairing the damage. The Federal Security Service, a successor to the Soviet-era KGB, and prosecutors are probing the “terrorist act,” Sechin said on state television.

The 74-year-old, 25-megawatt station will be shut for “at least six weeks to two months,” Ali Sottaev, director of RusHydro’s unit in the southern Russian Kabardino-Balkaria republic, said on the NTV television channel.

Electricity is being supplied from other locations without disruption to consumers, RusHydro spokeswoman Yelena Vishnyakova said by phone. The blasts occurred at about 5:25 a.m. Moscow time, the company said on its website.

Two turbines out of three were damaged by the blast, said Oleg Grekov, a spokesman for the Emergency Ministry in Rostov- on-Don. A fire at the plant has been extinguished, he said.

Terrorism

Russia’s North Caucasus, which includes Chechnya and Dagestan, is plagued by an Islamist insurgency, the country’s highest unemployment rates and rampant corruption. President Dmitry Medvedev submitted a draft law that would tighten criminal responsibility for terrorism, according to a statement published today on the Kremlin website.

Federal forces fought two wars against separatists in Chechnya, who have taken credit for the country’s worst terrorist assaults. An attack by militants on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in September 2004 left 350 people dead, half of them children. Suicide bombers attacked two Moscow subway stations March 29 and Russia’s Federal Security Service averted a planned double bombing on the subway by militants, Kommersant reported on July 17.

Another explosive detonated at about 3 a.m., damaging a police station in the city of Baksan, near where the power station is located, investigators said. No one was injured.

At least 75 people were killed in an accident at RusHydro’s Sayano-Shushenskaya plant in Siberia last August, which will cost more than a $1 billion to rebuild.

Two Russian Islamist groups claimed responsibility for the disaster. Russian prosecutors denied the claims, saying it was caused by a combination of technical and human factors.

--Editors: Torrey Clark, Brad Cook

To contact the reporter on this story: Maria Kolesnikova in Moscow at mkolesnikova@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter at ccarpenter@bloomberg.net.

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