[prehighaltitudesjj]

Subway Suicide Bombings Kill Dozens in Moscow

By Simon Shuster / Moscow Monday, Mar. 29, 2010

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1976117,00.html#ixzz0ja07PWKg

Russia was again the scene of grisly carnage as two suicide blasts ripped through the packed carriages of separate trains on Moscow's metro during the morning commute Monday, killing at least 38 people and injuring dozens of others. Judging in part by the severed remains of the two female attackers, Russian officials blamed the coordinated bombings on homegrown Islamist rebels, raising fears that the militants' vow to escalate their insurgency in the troubled Caucasus region had caused violence to spread to the Russian heartland for the second time in four months.

Pointing to a possible motivation behind the attacks was the fact that one of the bombers struck just beneath the headquarters of the FSB, Russia's secret police. Known as the KGB before the fall of the Soviet Union, the agency's harsh security tactics in the isolated Caucasus Mountains have incensed local separatists who've been fighting for years to turn parts of the country into an Islamic caliphate governed by strict Sharia law.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB agent who later became head of the FSB, has overseen several brutal campaigns against the Islamic separatists, starting with the second Chechen war in 1999 that established his popularity in Russia as an unflinching leader. On Monday, he warned of a new crackdown against those responsible for the bombings. "I am certain that law enforcement agencies will do everything to find the criminals and bring them to justice. The terrorists will be destroyed," Putin said in televised remarks. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, meanwhile, ordered police to tighten security across the country and urged people to stay calm. "It's absolutely clear that these kinds of acts are well-planned and intended to cause mass shock, to destabilize the country and the society," Medvedev said.

The 1999 Chechen war was precipitated by a series of deadly apartment bombings in Russian cities, including Moscow, and human rights activists have warned that new terrorist attacks could lead to more military campaigns in Chechnya or the other violence-wracked parts of the North Caucasus — Ingushetia and Dagestan. The insurgents' leader, a warlord named Doku Umarov, renewed his pledge last month to bring "holy war" to Russia's cities and industrial centers in an effort to carve out an Islamic state. "Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns. The war is coming to their cities," Umarov said in an interview posted Feb. 14 on the separatist website www.kavkazcenter.com. "If the Russians think this war is being waged on television screens, somewhere in the far-off Caucasus ... then God willing, we are about to show them that this war is coming to their homes." The government has faced criticism for failing to heed his threats, even after he took responsibility for the bombing of a train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg in November that killed 27 people.

Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the General Prosecutor's office, said a preliminary investigation indicated that two female bombers carried out Monday's attack. "The bombs seem to have been attached at waist-level and consisted of between one and two kilograms of TNT, which was powerful and had been packed with shrapnel," he told reporters gathered at Lubyanka Square, the home of the FSB. Eyewitnesses described stunned victims fleeing the Lubyanka station moments after one of the attackers struck there at 8 a.m., some with their clothes covered in blood. "Others were leaning on each other and staggering, and another man kept crossing himself as he walked by, thanking god he was alive," says Lyudmila Samokatova, a newspaper vender on Lubyanka Square. In the tunnels, there was panic. "There were definitely hundreds of us packed in there and nobody was moving. People started saying there could be a third explosion and things got frantic," says Natalia Kuznetsova, a theater ticket vendor near Lubyanka Square, who was on another train at the time of the attacks. By early afternoon, emergency workers had begun carrying the dead out of the station in black bags and taking them to the morgue.

The site of the second attack, which came within 40 minutes of the first, was the Park Kultury metro station, a few miles southwest of Lubyanka Sqaure. The entryway to the station was filled Monday morning with the smell of char rising up from the deep tunnels. An ambulance driver outside the station said the death toll could be expected to rise, as hospitals were filling up with the wounded and the work of recovering the dead was still underway. "We're taking [the injured] wherever we can, all over the place. I've heard calls go out for drop-offs to about a dozen hospitals," he says, declining to give his name as he was not authorized to speak to the press.
At the Sklifosovsky Hospital, one of Moscow's largest, a grim vigil began in the late morning as roughly a dozen people lined up to ask about missing family members. Igor Yegorov was there to look for his wife. "She went to work as usual this morning and I can't reach her. Hopefully it's just that the cell phone networks are down. But I don't know," he says, pale and shaking as he waited to check the hospital list. By late afternoon, the flow of ambulances to the hospital had stopped, and service had been restored to the rest of the metro system, which was not damaged in the blasts.

Whether the attack was part of the Islamic insurgency in the Caucasus or not, one thing is clear: terrorist groups are now capable of carrying out dramatic attacks in the heart of the capital. Putin and Medvedev will now face public pressure to wipe out the rebel groups for good, and it may be hard for them to resist the temptation to boost their approval ratings by using the harshest means available to do so.

[Soypopetype]

Sick sadistic bastards are always friggen killing innocent people!!

Why won't they just go off into the mountains or something and just kill themselves?!!

[VioletttaJosetta]

By MEGAN K. SCOTT, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK – U.S. transit agencies beefed up security as a precaution Monday following the suicide bombing in Moscow's subway system, sending more police into stations and having officers conduct random inspections of rail yards.

In New York, caravans of police vehicles were dispatched to transit hubs, and officers assigned to subways overnight were held in place so they overlapped with the day tour. Special units distinguished by their special black uniforms, helmets and body armor also were assigned to transit facilities.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_subway_security So, if it's anything like 2007 there will be 2-5 guys standing around talking to each other (or flirting with good looking girls) but only on Manhattan Island. Because no terrorist would ever think to get on the subway in Queens or Brooklyn.

[VemyhemiHef]

^
What it looked like this morning.

[UJRonald]

More Security Theater.

Other than getting lucky at the scene, the only way to stop terrorist acts is with Intelligence, uncovering plots before the act. Unfortunately, that means oppressive surveillance for the rest of us.

[Abebpabeniemo]

^
Actually, effective surveillence is undetectable (if not, it's not going to find out much.) It's the ham handed deterance type operations that tend to be oppressive.

[Gintovtosik]

^
It's the "undetectable" surveillance that I find most oppressive. Oppressive as in police state.

At least you know where you stand when someone's in your face. Not so when it's in the shadows.

[Soadiassy]

While I agree that the police presence is almost always only seen in Manhattan I was wondering what that is based on - simply a reassuring 'presence' that the NYPD wants to demonstrate or maybe there is a belief that this is the most effective means of action (after all we can't have every entry way onto the train manned).

It seems that, at least in the and against the US, terrorists have chosen symbols over numbers every time. Whereas a train might be easy to hit and crowded in Brooklyn they appear to want things like "Grand Central" or "Times Square" - I'd probably suspect that a terrorist planner will pick a named subway stop over some random "77th st". It would then makes sense that they'd have cops in those places, the rest as much of us unfortunately have to accept, rests on the shoulders of the straphangers that a guy with big cylinders of liquid might be riding next to.

As for the OP I feel for the victims. Nobody deserves that and I hope Russia investigates and works to prevent further attacks rather than pursuing symbolic demonstrations of force as they had in the past.

[Searmoreibe]

I always felt uneasy walking through Grand Central with the armed militia/National Guard or whoever was standing there.

Most terrorist attacks are not affairs where they assault directly, so having armed guards there only ups the body count.

And although I love dogs, and know they are MUCH more effective than humans in these situations, some of those skitty German Shepherds are kind of scary as you walk a LITTLE to close to them and they whip around...

The best money spent on this stuff is intelligence. Finding out what the plans are before they happen, and inclusion of more innocuous search pooches like Hounds and the like to be able to walk around these places w/o looking like they can (or would) take your arm off.

"User". The only problem with guarding the stations in Brooklyn and Queens would be simple. Which ones? How much money are you willing to spend to get a competent crew standing guard around a less central subway station?

There is no real easy solution achieved by sticking more people on guard.

[texbrease]

I always felt uneasy walking through Grand Central with the armed militia/National Guard or whoever was standingthee.

A few years ago I was in Grand Central to take Metro North to the Botanical Garden. Camera bag over one shoulder, and a tripod in a case slung over the other, I was stopped by two SWAT people. I thought about cracking a joke; then thought better of it. Just unzipped the bags and said "Camera equipment."