Thaindian News

Moscow, March 30 (IANS/AKI) Russia has said a gang of so-called ‘black widow’ extremists could be behind Monday’s twin attacks by women suicide bombers on Moscow’s metro stations which killed at least 38 people and injured over 60.
At an emergency meeting held at the Kremlin Monday, Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) told president Dmitry Medvedev that the bombers were probably ‘black widow’ women.

‘Black widow’ is a term given to those women who have lost their husbands, brothers or close relatives in one of the two Chechen wars Russia fought against Islamist rebels since 1994 and are allegedly being recruited by militant groups. The women belong to the Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan.

No group has, however, claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, said they had opened an investigation into the “suspected acts of terrorism”.

Detectives were preparing to publish CCTV images in an attempt to track down the accomplices of the two bombers, whose explosive belts were packed with iron bits to maximise death and injury.

The bombers have been identified from surveillance video filmed inside the underground trains, sources said. Recordings from other cameras installed in the halls and crossings of the metro stations pinpointed two other women and a man.

Fragments of the two women suicide bombers’ bodies including the head of a “young woman” and the remains of an “older woman” were recovered from the underground, they said.

The first blast occurred about 8 a.m. local time at Lubyanka subway station. Another blast happened within 30 minutes at Park Kultury station, on the same train line.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who cut short a visit to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, said a crime that was “terrible in its consequences and heinous in its manner” had been committed.

World leaders have also condemned the attacks. US President Barack Obama described them as heinous, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that such acts could never be justified and French President Nicholas Sarkozy expressed France’s “total solidarity” with Russia.

In earlier similar attacks, at least 39 people were killed in a bomb blast on Moscow’s metro in February 2004, while six months later a suicide bomber killed 10 people outside another station.

–IANS/RIA Novosti

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