Police Seek Clues in Moscow Subway Blast

Police combed the remains of a subway car shattered in a bombing that killed 39 people and questioned dozens of injured on Saturday, while two men were reportedly detained in connection with Moscow’s deadliest terrorist attack in years.

The men were detained at a traffic police checkpoint and resembled a composite sketch released of a man suspected of involvement in the Friday morning rush-hour bombing, according to Russian news agencies.

The sketch was based on a videotape from the subway station nearest to the blast, showing a woman suspected of being the bomber and her alleged accomplice standing on the platform of the station before boarding the train.

The bomb, which Deputy Mayor Valery Shantsev said contained the equivalent of 11 pounds of TNT, tore through the subway car after it left the Avtozavodskaya station and headed for the city center.

It shattered windows throughout the train and left the targeted car a hulk of twisted metal. Bodies still lay side-by-side on the seats, covered in soot. Other bloodstained corpses, their clothes torn, lined the tracks.

In addition to the 39 killed, 134 were wounded; 113 of them remained in hospital on Saturday.

Officials refrained from saying whether the blast was the work of a suicide bomber, although that was seen as the most likely scenario. “We have this information, but cannot say anything definite so far,” deputy city prosecutor Vladimir Yudin told ITAR-Tass.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack, but President Vladimir Putin accused Chechen separatists of staging the bombing.

Putin said the attack appeared aimed at sowing discord before next month’s presidential election, and warned he would not negotiate.

“Russia doesn’t conduct negotiations with terrorists – it destroys them,” Putin said Friday.

Chechnya’s chief mufti, or Muslim spiritual leader, condemned the blast. “There are no goals that can justify terrorism and the murder of peaceful civilians,” Akhmad Shamayev was quoted as saying by the news agency Interfax.

Chechens and others of North Caucasian appearance already are subject to close scrutiny in Moscow – frequently being stopped for document checks – and the pressure appeared likely to increase.

“All people who look suspicious must be sent away from Moscow,” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, said.

Dmitry Rogozin, a leading nationalist lawmaker with close connections to the Kremlin, called for introducing a state of emergency.

“The enemy is here, inside. This is an ethnic criminal community that evidently supports the terrorists coming to Moscow, owns property in Moscow and imposes its will on authorities,” he was quoted as saying by Interfax.

After the bombing, security measures were intensified at railway stations and the capital’s airports, news reports said.

The attack was not the first in Moscow’s subway – the world’s busiest with an average 8.5 million riders a day – but it was the bloodiest.

Hundreds of people were donating blood, reports said. A few flowers were left at the entrance to the Avtozavodskaya station.

The Moscow Metro has long been seen as especially vulnerable to terrorism. Police routinely stop people in the stations who appear to be Chechens or from the North Caucasus area, but crowds make thorough surveillance impossible.

Putin, who is expected to win the March 14 presidential elections handily, has built much of his strong image on a firm refusal to negotiate with the Chechen rebels whom Russia has been fighting for most of the past decade.

He linked the attack to Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected Chechen president after Russian forces withdrew in 1996 at the end of a disastrous 20-month war against separatist rebels.

Maskhadov’s foreign envoy, Akhmed Zakayev, denied the Chechen leader was involved.

In December, a suicide bomber blew herself up outside the National Hotel across from Moscow’s Red Square, killing at least five bystanders. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a Moscow rock concert last July, killing themselves and 14 other people. Five days later, an aborted suicide bomb attack at a Moscow restaurant killed a disposal expert who was trying to defuse the bomb.

A bombing in a Moscow subway car in 1996 killed four people; in 2000, a bomb exploded at a pedestrian underpass filled with kiosks at Pushkin Square, the site of three subway stations.

The deadliest terrorist bombings in Moscow occurred in 1999, when more than 150 people were killed in two apartment house blasts. Those explosions were among the events that prompted the Kremlin to launch the second military campaign in Chechnya.

In October 2002, 129 hostages died when Chechen rebels stormed a Moscow theater, almost all the victims died from the knockout gas that Russian forces pumped into the theater to end the siege.