Russian police on Sunday hunted for the bombers behind an attack that killed around 25 people on an elite passenger train, while relatives undertook the grim task of identifying bodies.
It remained unclear why attackers had struck the Nevsky Express, a train popular with well-off Russians and foreign tourists, as it ran from Moscow to St Petersburg late on Friday evening.
“An active investigative and operational effort is under way to identify and find the individuals involved in the crime,” Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for investigators, said on state television.
Markin said forensic experts had returned on Sunday morning to the scene of the disaster, a wooded area about 400km northwest of Moscow, to look for clues.
The chief of Russia’s FSB security service had said earlier the blast that derailed the train was caused by an improvised explosive device with the force of 7kg of TNT.
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev has said that evidence suggests several persons took part in the attack and a description of one of the suspects has been released.
Meanwhile, the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church called on authorities to give a “powerful reply” to the people behind the train bombing.
“We believe the reply will be effective and powerful enough to show these shameful, terrible people that ... when the hand of an enemy is lifted against our lives, we are able to defend our citizens,” Patriarch Kirill said at a memorial service in Moscow.
The comments were the strongest statement of anger against the perpetrators by a senior public figure. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday called for calm and ordered officials to do everything to help the victims of the attack.
No one has claimed responsibility for the blast, but security analysts said militant groups from Russia’s mainly Muslim North Caucasus were the most likely culprits.
Another explosion hit a railway in Russia’s restive Caucasus region of Dagestan early yesterday.
“A railway was hit by an explosion before a train traveling from Tyumen to [Azerbaijan’s capital] Baku passed,” a local police official told Russian news agencies.
Separately, Dagestan’s interior ministry said its officers had defused eight booby-trapped bombs on the weekend along roads on the region’s border with Chechnya.
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