The leader of the Caucasus Emirate has claimed responsibility for the March 29 suicide attacks in the Russian capital of Moscow that killed 39 people.

Doku Umarov, the emir of the al Qaeda-linked Caucasus Emirate, took credit for the suicide attack in a video released on the Internet. The video was published on Youtube by Kavkaz Center, the pro-jihadist website that focuses on the jihad in the Caucasus. Umarov previously described Kavkaz as “our Mujahideen website, the State website.”

Umarov claimed that the Moscow suicide attacks are “a retaliation and a retribution for the massacre by Russian invaders of the poorest residents of Chechnya and Ingushetia, who were picking wild garlic in the Arshty village on February 11, 2010, to feed their families,” according to a summary of his statement which was posted on Kavkaz.

In February, Russian security forces said they killed more than 20 of Umarov’s fighters during a raid on a terrorist camp in the village of Arshty, which is in a mountainous region in the Republic of Ingushetia near the border with Chechnya.

Umarov also reiterated today that his suicide bombers would strike deep inside Russia. He first made this claim in a statement that was published at Kavkaz in mid-February 2010.

Russians could no longer “idly watch the war in the Caucasus on their TV sets, watch it quietly, with no reaction to excesses and crimes committed by their gangs, which are being sent to the Caucasus under the leadership of Putin,” Umarov said in today’s statement.

"Therefore the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it with your own lives and skins," he finished.

Umarov’s admission that his forces carried out the Moscow suicide attacks contradicts a prior statement in which he denied any involvement. Umarov previously told a Russian news channel that Russia’s Federal Security Service had carried out the attacks.

Umarov's admission that he is responsible for the Moscow suicide attacks takes place the same day that two suicide bombers killed 13 people in the city of Kizlyar in Dagestan. Nine policemen, including the Kizlyar chief of police, were among those killed.

In early 2009, Umarov reestablished the Riyad-us-Saliheen, or Garden of Paradise, martyr brigade and re-launched a terror campaign in the Caucasus [see LWJ report, "Ingush President wounded as Caucasus Emirate revives martyrdom operations"].

Female suicide bombers from the Caucasus, known as Black Widows, have targeted Russian civilians and security personnel in multiple attacks, including: the attack on the Nord-Ost Moscow theater (129 killed); an assassination attempt against Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov (14 killed); a suicide attack on a train in Southern Russia (46 killed); a dual suicide attack at a rock concert at Tushino Airfield in Moscow (16 killed); the destruction of two Russian airliners in 2004 (more than 90 killed); the attack on a school in Beslan in North Ossetia (334 killed); and the Moscow metro bombings (39 killed).

For more information on the suicide attacks in Moscow and Dagestan, see 13 killed in double suicide attack in southern Russia and 'Black Widow' female suicide bombers kill 39 in Moscow metro blasts