EXICO CITY, Dec. 24 - Gunmen thought to be street gang members opened fire at a city bus in Honduras on Thursday night, killing 28 people, including 4 children, who were on their way home from work and last-minute Christmas shopping.

The attack happened about 7 p.m., the authorities said, in one of the poorest sections of the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. About six men in a dark-colored pickup truck cut in front of the moving bus, which was packed with more than 70 passengers, and opened fire with automatic weapons.

A spokesman for the Security Ministry, Leonel Sauceda, said 28 passengers, including 4 children ranging in age from 2 to 15, had been killed. An additional 29 passengers were wounded.

The attackers left a large note taped to the bus windshield. In it, Mr. Sauceda said, the gunmen claimed they were members of a leftist guerrilla group, the Cinchoneros, which had long been thought to be defunct.

The note cursed President Ricardo Maduro; the president of Congress, Porfirio Lobo Sosa; and Security Minister Óscar Álvarez, Mr. Sauceda said. It blamed the government's anticrime campaigns for the attack and warned that there would be more bloodshed.

Mr. Sauceda said the government was investigating all leads. But he said most of the evidence gathered so far indicated that the attack had been committed by street gangs, known as maras, which have caused a devastating crime wave across Central America and Mexico over the last decade.

The police arrested one suspect on Thursday night, Mr. Sauceda said. He would not identify the man except to say he was a member of the Mara Salvatrucha, one of the country's largest gangs.

The suspect, Mr. Sauceda said, was driving a truck that matched the description of the truck involved in the shooting and was carrying a .38-caliber pistol. The truck was full of spent casings from automatic weapons, he said.

Flanked by the ministers of security and defense, President Maduro addressed the nation on television on Thursday night and said his government would not bow to such attacks.

"This is a barbaric and cowardly act like few we have seen in the history of Honduras," he said. "We will punish those responsible with the full weight of the law. "We will not rest. We will not back down."

The police have estimated that there are more than 100,000 gang members in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. The two largest gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Mara 18, were started in Los Angeles among the children of men and women who fled Central America during the civil wars of the 1980's.

In a crackdown against gangs during the mid-1990's, the United States began deporting thousands of gang members back to their native Central America. There, they began organizing new groups, and their violence turned poor neighborhoods into battlefields. Two years ago, the homicide rate increased by 50 percent in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, the authorities said.

In response to the violence, Mr. Maduro opened a crackdown against gangs - known as Mano Dura, Spanish for Tough Hand - that punishes gang members with as much as 12 years in jail. And he ordered the military to join the police in huge raids in gang neighborhoods.

More than 1,300 suspected or convicted gang members have been arrested, Mr. Sauceda said. And the homicide rate has plummeted.

"The gangs thought they were in control of the country, but now they are watching their members go to jail, and they are desperate," he said of the bus attack on Thursday.

There was some speculation on Friday that the attack was revenge for a fire in a gang cellblock in May that killed 107 suspected members of the Mara Salvatruchas. A year earlier, another suspicious fire in a gang cellblock at a prison called El Porvenir killed 68 members of the Mara 18.

An independent investigation into the fire at El Porvenir found that at least 59 of the victims had been stabbed, shot or burned to death by guards and soldiers.

In the Chamelecón neighborhood, where the bus attack happened, residents said Friday that they did not know whom to blame or whom to trust.

The attack occurred four blocks from a clinic where nurse practitioners remove tattoos from young men and women struggling to get out of gangs. On Thursday night, the clinic turned into an emergency room for victims from the bullet-riddled bus. On Friday, the nurses there were distributing tranquilizers to distressed relatives of the dead.

"What do we think? We don't know what to think," one nurse, Suyapa Bonilla, said by telephone. "It could be the gangs. It could be the police. It could be some other mafia.

"The only thing we know," she added, "is that no one feels safe anymore."

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OSCOW, Dec. 16 - On Sunday, Russia plans to auction the jewel of what used to be its most profitable, high-profile and well-run private company: the oil giant Yukos. And if the auction takes place, the winner most likely will be a financially opaque, government-run natural gas behemoth, Gazprom.

Practically overnight, Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, would create an energy company that not only controls about 20 percent of the nation's oil exports but also has some of the world's largest energy reserves.

A Kremlin campaign that unfolded over the last year will have succeeded in dismembering the country's foremost private oil company, and it will send a signal to Russia's business elite that the state is back in business, literally.

Yukos was created under questionable circumstances from the remains of state oil assets in the early and mid-1990's. On its face, the Russian government is trying to sell Yukos's largest production subsidiary, Yuganskneftegas, to pay back a tax claim of more than $27 billion. But the startlingly low opening bid of $8.65 billion, which the government set, was expected to tip the scales toward a state-friendly bidder like Gazprom.

A ruling late Thursday in a federal bankruptcy court in Houston, however, raised some questions about the participation in the auction of banks that were expected to finance the deal. A federal bankruptcy judge in Houston, Letitia Z. Clark, issued a temporary restraining order intended to block the participation of lenders and Gazprom. The banks, analysts said, have extensive operations in the United States and might be concerned about ignoring the restraining order, which could put them in contempt of court.

But Judge Clark's ruling did not apply to the government of Russia, and analysts said they expected the Russian authorities would go ahead with the auction on Sunday regardless of the ruling.

The management of Yukos, in a statement late Thursday, said that while they were heartened by the ruling and would continue their fight in the American courts, they remained realistic about its immediate effect.

Although two other largely unknown companies have submitted bids for Yukos in the auction, their presence was seen as purely an effort to make the auction seem valid. Foreign investors, including companies from China, India and other overseas energy investors, have been discouraged from participating.

If the auction is completed on Sunday, Yukos will essentially die that day - a casualty of efforts by Russian prosecutors that came with the tacit blessing of Mr. Putin. The founder of Yukos is now being held in jail, the company's American executives are in self-imposed exile and its shareholders are out billions of dollars. Russia's actions have set foreign and domestic investors on edge, prompted capital flight and raising questions about the rule of law and how businesses will fare.

Whether the Kremlin initially intended to dismantle Yukos, or merely to make an example of it to private business, is unclear, but a result, said Fiona Hill, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is "not outright nationalization, but creeping nationalization."

Mr. Putin had made no secret of the fact that he views Russia's oil and gas, diamonds and precious metals as strategic natural resources - weapons in his nation's fight to regain its global economic status.

For Mr. Putin, oil may also be more than just a strategic asset. It is a symbol of power and a resource that helped support the Soviet government, especially during troubled economic times. Thanks to oil exports, the Soviet Union managed to maintain the illusion of economic health even during years of stagnation in the 1970's and 1980's.

It is also Mr. Putin's best hope of restoring Russian ambitions and presenting a facade of security.

Only months ago, Yukos was the darling of Western investors and it was poised to become an international oil giant with influence far beyond Russia's borders.

Gazprom is the largest natural gas company in the world, with a quarter of all gas reserves. By adding Yukos's oil assets, it will become one of the largest energy companies in the world by reserves.

"The Kremlin wants to set the strategic economic agenda, and that means not leaving the long-term strategies and decisions about how revenues should be spent to private companies," Ms. Hill said. "The state wants control of the commanding heights. This is how Russia positions itself as a superpower."

With a bulked-up Gazprom, Mr. Putin will take a leaf out of the book from China, Japan and South Korea, where governments worked hand-in-hand to champion certain industries and build successful corporate leaders. Mr. Putin was probably paying close attention when China's high-technology giant, the Lenovo Group, bought the personal computer business of I.B.M. this month.

The Kremlin hopes to create huge world-class corporations in important sectors - what Vladimir Konovalov, a member of the Petroleum Advisory Forum, a lobbying group, has called "ship of state" companies.

Sergei Bogdanchikov, who would lead Gazprom's oil and gas business, said Gazprom wanted to compete with giants like Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell and BP.

Ms. Hill said it was even possible that Gazprom might someday buy oil assets outside of Russia.

For American consumers and investors, the obituary of Yukos would be a symbol of what Russia can do to companies that have come into such riches that even the Kremlin is envious.

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a little-known banker, took oil assets won at a controversial state auction in 1993 and developed Yukos into the country's most prominent and profitable commercial enterprise, worth nearly $40 billion a few months ago; it is now worth only $2 billion.

Early on, Mr. Khodorkovsky fought bitterly with some foreign shareholders. But in 2000, he decided to embrace Western-style corporate governance practices. Yukos's value soared, and Mr. Khodorkovsky even sought a merger with a smaller rival, Sibneft, and then a sale of his combined company to Exxon Mobil or ChevronTexaco.

The company did not become as visible as the Russian oil giant Lukoil, whose red-and-white gas stations are popping up in Manhattan and in other East Coast cities. But Yukos traced the arc of Russia's post-Communist economic recovery, with all the good and bad that post-Soviet capitalism offered. And Yukos put Russia on the map as an alternative to Middle Eastern oil - even as the campaign against Yukos helped push oil prices above $50 a barrel.

Yukos and Gazprom are vastly different. Mr. Khodorkovsky, 41, had no experience in the oil business. But he salted the exploration-and-production ranks of Yukos with expatriate engineers, like the Joe Mach and Ray Leonard of the United States. Yukos sponsored Formula One race cars, and its headquarters in downtown Moscow featured open architecture and posters of Mr. Khodorkovsky.

By the time it was a decade old, Yukos was Russia's top oil producer, with a global brand name. It was pumping 1.7 million barrels a day, or 2 percent of the world's supply. Mr. Khodorkovsky met with Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser in the Bush administration, in Washington; he visited Houston for energy summit meetings, and he pushed for Russia to start shipping oil to the United States.

The production costs at Yukos were lower than those of Russian competitors; it was the first private Russian oil company to export crude to China; and it proposed building privately financed pipelines to Asia. Other companies have been less embracing of free-market practices. Gazprom, for example, still provides some employee housing, kindergartens and special stores for workers. It boasts in television ads that it contributes a billion rubles a day - about $35 million - to the federal budget, and Aleksei Miller, its current head, is a Putin loyalist.

Mr. Putin, according to reports in the Russian media, was furious that a private energy giant was making decisions, and headlines, that were usually reserved for those in power behind Kremlin walls.

Mr. Khodorkovsky financed politicians and parties who pushed his agenda in Parliament, like lower taxes for oil companies. But then, not long after he revealed negotiations to sell part of Yukos to a major Western oil company, Mr. Khodorkovsky was arrested and jailed in October 2003. These days, he goes to criminal court four days a week in Moscow.

His lawyers posted a statement from Mr. Khodorkovsky on his Web site on Thursday, lamenting Yukos's downfall. "Such a turn of events is upsetting," he said.

So does the state-sponsored auction of Yukos mean foreign investors are still welcome in Russia? Conventional wisdom is divided.

Foreign investors are still welcome in the energy sector, but only in specific projects, and only on the government's timetable.

BP spent about $6.5 billion buying half of TNK, Russia's No. 3 oil producer behind Yukos and Lukoil. But even TNK's Russian shareholders conceded that such a deal probably would not have happened in this new environment. ConocoPhillips took an equity stake in Lukoil this year, but it was capped at 20 percent - not a controlling stake. Companies like Exxon Mobil, ChevronTexaco, Shell and others will be allowed to invest in specific projects - perhaps Gazprom's giant undeveloped Shtokman gas field-but not to buy companies outright.

"Putin is definitely re-Sovietizing" the oil and gas industry, said Michael J. Economides, a professor at the University of Houston and the co-author of "The Color of Oil."

In Houston on Thursday, in issuing the injunction, Judge Clark granted a request sought by the management of Yukos, which took the unusual step of filing for bankruptcy protection in Houston on Wednesday. The judge based her decision on testimony by Bruce Misamore, Yukos's chief financial officer and an American citizen, who said that investors in the United States stood to suffer from the auction.

Judge Clark wrote that "participants in international commerce, in Russia, in the United States and elsewhere, need to have an expectation that when they invest in foreign enterprises they may do so without fear that their investments may be the subject of confiscatory action by agencies of the foreign government."

The expected demise of Yukos has rattled even the world's biggest oil companies. Lee R. Raymond, chief executive at Exxon Mobil, said this month that he was re-evaluating whether it was the right time to invest in Russia. Mr. Raymond said in a television interview Dec. 7 that the government's actions against Yukos raised questions "about how they are going to manage their natural resources."

"Until some clarity comes to that, I think it's going to be pretty difficult for people to think about putting large sums of money in as an investment," Mr. Raymond said.

All along, the Russia government has argued that Yukos was merely a tax cheat, and that auctioning off Yuganskneftegas, which pumps a million barrels a day of oil, was meant simply to cover the tax bill.

But the sheer mountain of taxes the government claims seems to undermine that argument: Yukos now owes over $27 billion for the years 2000 through 2003 - more than all its revenues in some years, and during a period of record high oil prices.

Meanwhile, Mr. Khodorkovsky's imprisonment has prompted other Russian business executives to wonder if they might face government actions.

Igor Shuvalov, an aide to Mr. Putin, acknowledged this year that "whatever the outcome, the Yukos affair will be negative for the country because it harms its image."

But the end of Yukos has revealed unpleasant truths about the absence of the rule of law in Russia, and has corrupted every institution that was dragged into the process.

Erin E. Arvedlund reported from Moscow for this article and Simon Romero from Houston.

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