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By Lidia A. OkorokovaA little more than 6 years after the last metro bombingsin Moscow, two suicide attacks killed and injured dozens ofpeople on March 29th , 2010.The explosions in the metro in the Russian capital ofMoscow killed 39 people. 88 people were hospitalised withsevere injuries.The first suicide bomber boarded a metro car in the Lubyankastation in central Moscow at 7:50 a.m., the second explosionhappened forty minutes later at Park Kultury, alsoin the city centre.It is believed that bombs contained 6 kg of TNT in totaland were filled with pieces of metal for more damage.Those who carried out the attacks have been identified bythe law enforcement bodies using CCTV snapshots andbody parts found at the scene as two young women of a“Caucasus” origin.On the 1st of April, the police released CCTV snapshotsof the attackers and those involved in the explosions threedays earlier.The CCTV snapshots show that the terrorists were accompaniedby two men and a woman as they walked towardsthe metro cars in both stations. The possible accomplicesthen disappeared from the scene of crime. The police foundthe place where the bombs were prepared, an apartmentin one of the suburbs of Moscow. The law enforcement au-
thorities and the Federal Security Service have announced afederal hunt for these men.One of the eyewitnesses said “I was passing Park Kulturystation an hour after the attacks. I have never seen so manypolicemen. They worked very well, told us not to worry anduse a bus or trams instead”.There were people who gained from the attacks: taxi-drivers.Many people were scared to go back to the stations anduse metro, so they turned to the cabs. The taxi drivers hikedfares by ten to twenty times the normal price and thus profitedfrom this tragedy.“I just couldn’t come back there. So I decided to go by taxi.I stopped a private taxi and asked what the fee was. The taxidriver demanded a charge five times greater than normal toget to my workplace” says another eyewitness of the Moscowblasts.The reaction of the government’s officials to the attacks washarsh.Prime-minister Vladimir Putin promised a few hours afterthe attacks “we will find and eliminate everyone involved inthis crime” and that the terrorists “will be dragged out of thesewers”, RIA-Novosti reported.President Dmitry Medvedev commented on the tragedyonly four days later, saying that “there should be zero-toleranceon terrorists’ accomplices”.The March bombings brought back memories of 2004,when a male suicide bomber blew himself up in a metro carbetween Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya stations killing 41people on February 6 2004. In August that same year, a femalebomber killed 10 people outside a Rizhskaya metro station.The recent attack has many similarities, not just in the deathtoll of 39 people dead compared with 41 in February 2004, butalso in the way the bombings were carried out.Doku Umarov, a militant leader in the North Caucuses tookresponsibility for the attacks in a video message left at oneof the separatists’ websites. He said that the bombing was aresponse to a special forces’ operation against his “people” onFebruary 11, 2010.Doku Umarov is the self-proclaimed leader of the CaucasusEmirate. According to Russian authorities, he served twoprison sentences, one for a felony, and one for murder, beforejoining the separatist group in Chechnya, in the early 90s.Umarov threatened Russian authorities that there wouldbe more attacks carried out in the future. The Federal SecurityService, alongside with law enforcement authorities and someRussian politicians, believe that Umarov is just trying to promotehimself as a danger to Russia.Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin wantUmarov dead. Umarov commented on this in an interview onthe rebels’ website, saying ‘I would like to answer this questionfor both well-wishers and ill-wishers. To ill-wishers I say : wipeyour snot!’A writer at one of the separatists’ websites writes in his articlethat “the bombings of the metro and the blast of the elite train(Nevsky Express blast last year) are, in fact, a public declarationof dissatisfaction with Putin’s regime, and they destroy the Putinmyth - the myth of omnipotence, stability and order”.These two facts raise more questions about who and whycarried out the 2010 bombings.The ombudsman for Human rights in Chechnya warned thatthe blasts in metro might cause a wave of ethnic hatred against“Caucasian looking people” across Russia.The media reported cases where people were attacked becauseof their appearance by Russians angered by the bombingsin Moscow.Russia’s Islamic Cultural Center offered a reward of roughly€23,000 for any information on those who carried out theblasts in Moscow metro.Many media outlets reported a growing “bond between Russians”caused by the attacks. There are pictures of civiliansbringing flowers and candles to the stations of Lubyanka andPark Kultury posted and printed in the media.It is yet too early to say whether those responsible for thebombings are indeed the North Caucuses militants or someoneelse. The law enforcement forces and the Federal Securityservice are just entering the first phase of the investigation. Inreality, it can take up to three years for the Russian authoritiesto fully carry out an investigation of this magnitude.International <strong>Politics</strong>31
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