Moscow, 10 July 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Russia's Interior Ministry says a security officer was killed today when a bomb he was trying to defuse outside a Moscow restaurant exploded. Russian media reports that police detained a woman who brought the bomb to the restaurant in a bag and threatened to blow up the building. Experts failed to defuse the bomb by remote control on the street outside, and the bomb exploded when an officer with the Federal Security Service approached the device.
The blast on Tverskaya Street, a main thoroughfare in Moscow, comes five days after a suicide-bomb attack that killed more than a dozen people, as well as the two bombers, at an open-air rock festival in Moscow. Russian authorities blamed Chechen rebels for the suicide bombing on 5 July.