Man explodes grenade after ticket request

Man explodes grenade after ticket request (http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22834695-5003402,00.html)

From correspondents in Yekaterinburg, Russia

November 27, 2007 10:44pm

A Russian man blew himself up with a hand grenade shortly after train inspectors asked to see his ticket.

The inspectors thought they saw a hand grenade in the man's pocket and asked him to get off the commuter train at Asha station, in Chelyabinsk in the South Urals region.

He refused and instead demanded that the train go to Vladivostok, thousands of kilometres away on Russia's Pacific coast, said Liana Ergasheva of the local prosecutor's office.

“Inspectors wanted to check the papers of passengers who looked drunk, but he took out a grenade. He demanded the train should go to Vladivostok,” Ergasheva said.

Passengers were evacuated and negotiations with the police had started before Mikhail Ershov, 43, triggered the explosion, blasting out wind@ws in the train carriage.

“Ershov had taken the pin out, he then tried to put the pin back in the grenade, but instead it exploded,” the prosecutor said.

The explosion did not kill or injure anyone else.

:grenade:

Man that is definetly a news story for the wierd section. I can see it now - the guy trying to put the pin back in and then ka-BOOM. Thank goodness they had time to evacuate the passengers.

I wonder if they would have steamed ahead to Vladivostok if he had confronted the train's engineer with that grenade. I doubt it. In Russia when people pull out weapons in a hostage/hijack situation someone is going to die and soon. Remember when those Muslims from Chechnya got gassed to death along with many of their civilian hostages in that Moscow theater a few years back? That's the kind of inevitable bloodshed I'm referring to. Sort of like when a train derails in Indonesia you know that at least 1,000 people just bought the farm right then and there. That kind of thing.