Saint Paul encourages us in the reading from 1 Corinthians to celebrate the feast "not with the old yeast" of malice and wickedness "but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." The old yeast appears to be alive and well, however, evidenced Monday by a suicide bombing in Moscow's subway system that killed 39 people and injured scores of commuters during rush hour.

A Chechen militant claimed responsibility Wednesday for the deadly subway bombings as well as two new suicide bomb attacks that occurred Wednesday. The new attacks targeted police officers in Dagestan, a volatile southern province east of Chechnya, and left at least 12 people dead.

Doku Umarov, who leads Islamic militants in Chechnya and other regions in Russia's North Caucasus, said that Monday's twin suicide attacks were an act of revenge for the killing of civilians by Russian security forces. He blamed ordinary Russians for turning a blind eye to the civilian deaths in the Caucasus and warned that more attacks on Russian cities were coming.

Police and security services are a frequent target because they represent the Kremlin--the militants' ideological enemy--but also because of their heavy-handed tactics. Police have been accused of involvement in many killings, kidnappings, and beatings in the North Caucasus, angering residents and swelling the ranks of Islamic militants.

A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies said 916 people died in the North Caucasus in 2009 in violence related to the clashes, up from 586 in 2008. Another monitoring group, the Caucasian Knot, reported the region suffered 172 terrorist attacks last year.

Many said the Kremlin can no longer ignore the social and economic problems of its southern fringe. "The question is whether there will be accomplishments with social development to give people an alternative to blowing themselves up," said Sam Greene, a political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Source: Articles by Agence France Presse and Arsen Mollayev, Lynn Berry,
and David Nowak for the Associated Press