7.30am
MOSCOW - A blast tore through a Victory Day parade in a southern Russian republic bordering rebel Chechnya overnight, killing at least 34 people, including 12 children.
President Vladimir Putin vowed to hunt down and punish the attackers, whom he described as "scum" who should be treated like Nazis.
He blamed the attack in the Caspian Sea port of Kaspiisk on "terrorists," the usual Kremlin term to describe separatist Chechen rebels. Chechnya neighbours the impoverished province of Dagestan where the attack took place.
"This crime was carried out by scum who hold nothing sacred," an ashen Putin told a solemn Kremlin reception after a parade in Moscow's Red Square to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany 57 years ago.
"We have every right to treat them as Nazis, whose sole aim was to spread death, sow fear and to murder," he said. The audience observed a minute of silence.
Putin has made combating terrorism a rallying cry of his two-year-old rule, and says Russia is fighting the same brand of Muslim militants in Chechnya that Washington blames for the September 11 suicide attacks on the United States.
Police said a remote-controlled mine hidden in bushes exploded as a military band surrounded by children and World War Two veterans marched through Kaspiisk, home to a big a military base some 1,000 miles south of Moscow.
The death toll rose quickly, the regional Emergencies Ministry saying by early evening that 34 people, including 12 children, had died, Interfax reported.
Abdul Musayev, head of the regional interior ministry press office, said the device contained nuts, bolts and nails to cause maximum injury. Some 150 people were injured.
Dagestani authorities, who announced a day of mourning for Friday, blamed lax security for the attack, news agencies said.
In November 1996, a blast flattened a military barracks in the same town, killing 68 people, mostly service personnel but including around 20 children. Though it remains unsolved, some officials blamed Chechen rebels, while others said it may have been linked to gang wars over black market Caspian Sea caviar.
Moscow police beefed up security in the capital after the attack, the bloodiest in Russia since apartment house bombings in 1999 killed more than 300 people. The Kremlin blamed Chechens. One of those apartment block bombs hit the Dagestani town of Buinaksk, some 25 miles from Kaspiisk.
Video footage from Kaspiisk taken in the immediate aftermath and obtained by Reuters showed dozens of prostrate and bleeding bodies lying amid the debris of the blast.
A man carried a child's limp body to an ambulance, as sirens, wails and shouts filled the air. Military caps, ripped boots, wrecked drums and other musical instruments lay scattered across Kaspiisk's blood-splattered Lenin Street.
Pictures broadcast by NTV television showed wounded servicemen covered in blood, their uniforms torn in the explosion, on stretchers receiving treatment in hospital.
"The scene is horrifying. There are body parts everywhere and an overpowering smell of blood," NTV correspondent Ruslan Gusarev said.
Between sobs, a pensioner told RTR television: "Suddenly it became dark, kids were running next to them (the band). Then there were corpses, corpses, flesh."
The attack came just before Putin addressed the traditional Victory Day parade outside the towering red walls of the Kremlin, urging the nation to unite to defeat the common threat as it had done to crush Adolf Hitler in 1945.
"Only by uniting the effort of the people and the state can we confront these threats," Putin said.
World War Two, which Russians call the Great Patriotic War, cost 27 million lives in the Soviet Union and the victory remains one of the few achievements of the Communist era which continues to unite Russia, a vast and often fractious nation.
Bomb blasts have rocked Russian regions, mostly those close to Chechnya, since Moscow sent troops back into the secessionist province to bring it back to its fold. The authorities routinely blame the blasts on separatist guerrillas.
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