Police avert attempt to sabotage Russian city's power supply

Ufa, Apr 30, 2005 -- BBC Monitoring

A sabotage attack on a power line in Ufa, which might have resulted in a blackout of a large part of the city, has been averted.

The press service of the Bashkortostan Interior Ministry told Interfax that today an improvised bomb was found and defused next to an electricity pylon belonging to the Ufimskiye Elektroseti joint-stock company. According to the press service, at 1030 hours local time a mechanic from the city's power network service called the Ufa police and told them there was a suspicious object near a high-voltage power line at 12 Ryazanskaya Street. An OMON [special-purpose police] alert team of sappers from the Bashkortostan Interior Ministry soon arrived at the scene, seven minutes before the device was due to detonate, and defused the improvised bomb, which was made of a five-litre canister of nitrate fertilizer, a wired electronic detonator and an alarm clock with a timer. According to experts, if the bomb had detonated, the entire southern section of this city with a population of one million people would have been left without electricity.

Source: Interfax news agency, Moscow, in Russian 1222 gmt 30 Apr 05

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