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Russian MP calls for intensified antiterrorist training of security services

MOSCOW, December 29, /ITAR-TASS/. Chairman of the State Duma committee for civil, criminal, arbitrational, and procedural legislation, Pavel Krasheninnikov, has called for intensifying the counter-terrorist training of security services and for establishing tighter cooperation between the various departments responsible for the maintenance of security, law and order.

When Itar-Tass turned to him for comments on the situation around Sunday’s act of suicide bombing at a railway station in the southern Russian city of Volgograd that took away the lives of sixteen people and left forty-five others wounded, he said “there can be no relaxing or losing vigilance for a single second.”

“All the services should step up collaboration for identifying the potential terrorists,” Krasheninnikov said. “If necessary, the government should allocate additional financing for the purpose.”

Along with it, he aired a negative note as regards the appeals to toughen the Russian criminal legislation, saying: “It’s impossible to re-tailor the Criminal Code endlessly.

“We’ve changed legislation after many similar tragic incidents in the past and the antiterrorist clauses of the Russian Criminal Code are among the world’s harshest ones at present,” Krasheninnikov said. “Unfortunately, this doesn’t help - people who venture to kill themselves for the purpose of committing terrorist acts can’t be scared by death sentences.”

He expressed condolences to the families and friends of the Volgograd bombing victims.

Earlier Sunday, Chechnya’s President Ramzan Kadyrov called for adopting a law that would “harsh up the punishment /for terrorist acts/ limitlessly.”

“I’m confident we’ll never eradicate this evil by playing democrats and humanists and I urge the State Duma to use the next session as an opportunity for adopting a law that would harsh up limitlessly the punishment for people committing terrorist acts, sharing the terrorists’ ideology, proliferating it, or training the terrorists,” Kadyrov wrote on his page in the Instagram social network.

A female suicide bomber set off an explosive device at the entrance of Volgograd’s central railway station at 12:45 Moscow time on Sunday. Apart from the 16 deaths, as many as 45 people were injured and 40 of them were admitted to hospitals.

Russia’s federal Interior Ministry said the woman, who behaved in a suspicious way, was noticed by a police sergeant when she had just entered the ground floor of the building. She set the explosive device off when he had come up to her at distance of a few steps.