Rail travel between Moscow and St Petersburg resumed yesterday, two days after a bomb placed on the tracks derailed an express train, killing at least 26 people.
Passenger services on Russia’s busiest rail link re-started during the morning, state-run national railways said on its Web site.
Six-hundred-and-sixty-one passengers were on the 13-carriage Nevksy Express when the rear carriages of the train derailed. Eighteen people remained unaccounted for, while 80 were still being treated in hospital yesterday.
A right-wing nationalist group claimed responsibility for planting the bomb, but those behind the attack were believed to be Chechen rebels or criminals.
“We are indeed talking about a terrorist attack,” Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigating committee, told the Russian news agency Interfax.
The bomb contained the equivalent of 7kg of TNT, investigations showed. A second explosion occurred during rescue operations on Saturday, but no one was injured.
Reports cited passengers as saying how they had heard a loud bang just before the derailment as the train was speeding along at 200kph.
In the aftermath, survivors criticized the rescue operations. They said they had to wait for more than an hour until doctors arrived and they were given little information about the situation.
The Nevsky Express is popular with businessmen and tourists. It was the target of an attack in August 2007 when 60 people were injured.
Two Chechens were arrested for that attack, which was carried out with the help of a disgruntled former Russian soldier.
Extremists from conflict regions in the northern Caucasus have been blamed for a string of attacks on civilian targets in Russia.
The explosion took place deep in the forest, as the train sped past a power station and a small painted wooden house where an elderly woman lives alone. Because the area is so remote, people from nearby towns got to the site hours before rescue workers, and some of the grimmest work — sorting the dead from the living — fell to them.
Rudolf Denyayev climbed over a small ridge on Friday night and saw the whole disaster spread out before him: train passengers wandering blindly, luggage tossed in all directions, screams coming from the derailed cars.
By the time Denyayev was down the hill, some passengers had straggled out of three derailed cars, some barefoot and some barely dressed, as if they had just gone to sleep to the quiet rhythm of the train. They didn’t seem to know what was going on, Denyayev recalled in an interview on Saturday night.
Anatoly Myagchenkov, a tractor driver who made it to the site with two friends, noticed that he was stepping on passports, money and cellphones as he approached the overturned train cars. He held onto the back of a friend’s sweater. It took all his concentration to keep from stepping on a body.
“Everyone thought no one was coming,” said Myagchenkov, 30. “The passengers thought I was one of them. Those who couldn’t stand, we took out the window. We put the living on one side, the corpses on the other.”
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