Bombings in Russia Raise Fears on Two Fronts

Muscovites are terrified, and that's exactly what the authors of Monday's killer bomb want. Just hours after the blast that killed 116 people and leveled an apartment building, police found two tons of explosives in another Moscow apartment building. Authorities are blaming Chechen terrorists for the attacks. They claim that a Chechen man wanted in connection with last weeks apartment bombing in which 90 people were killed had rented a storage space in the crumpled building, and politicians of every stripe hastened to connect the attacks to the continuing war in Dagestan. "At the same time, though," says TIME Moscow bureau chief Paul Quinn-Judge, "theyre also stressing that theyre not grounds for declaring a state of emergency, which could be used to cancel elections."

While Chechen Islamic separatists who are behind the fighting in Dagestan have certainly resorted to terror attacks inside Russia on many occasions in the past, many Russian politicians fear that President Boris Yeltsin may use them as a pretext to claim emergency powers and hang on to power. "Faced with a corruption scandal that wont simply go away, that scenario may be tempting for Yeltsin," says Quinn-Judge. "But theres no guarantee that he could actually pull it off and survive. There are even real questions over whether he could muster the support of the necessary security forces to make a state of emergency effective." Meanwhile, as Muscovites live in fear of having their homes blown up, their confidence is not bolstered by local police work. Authorities released a sketch and the name of the wanted man Monday someone who turns out to have been killed in a car accident in February.