Moscow observed an official day of mourning yesterday and nervous commuters returned to the metro, while the death toll from twin suicide bombings on the capital’s underground railway rose by one to 39 people.
Flags across Moscow flew at half-mast and somber Muscovites laid flowers and lit candles at the stations hit by the blasts blamed on North Caucasus rebels.
The police presence was stepped up at Moscow metro stations, and security was tightened on the networks in cities from St Petersburg to Novosibirsk in Siberia, local media reported.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Entertainment programs on radio and television were dropped as Moscow observed the official day of mourning for the victims.
Morning commuters warily entered the busy metro system a day after the rush-hour blasts on packed trains at two central stations — Lubyanka and Park Kultury.
“When I was riding the metro in today, somebody’s electronic watch started beeping and I thought: ‘That’s it,’” said Katya Vankova, a business student.
Makeshift memorials were set up at both stations. At Park Kultury, people left red carnations and tied white ribbons to a stand on the platform close to where the bomb went off. Some commuters crossed themselves as they passed by.
A young injured woman died early yesterday, bringing the death toll to 39, Andrei Seltsovsky, the chief of Moscow’s health department, said on state-run Rossiya 24 television.
He said that 71 other people were still in hospital, five of them in critical condition, and eight of the victims had been identified. Officials said the bombs that caused the carnage were packed with bolts and iron rods.
Some papers said the attack represented a failure of the government’s security policy. They wrote that years of official propaganda had lulled Russians into thinking there was little to fear from the Islamist insurgency in the turbulent and mainly Muslim North Caucasus.
The bombings — one at Lubyanka station that serves the nearby headquarters of the Federal Security Service, which is responsible for protecting Russia’s citizens — underscored the country’s vulnerability to militants.
Russian police were yesterday hunting for clues from the North Caucasus over the origins and the identities of the two female suicide bombers who set of the explosions.
All that remained of the two women were fragmented body parts after they detonated explosives strapped to their bodies within a space of half an hour early on Monday.
The popular but well-connected Life.ru news Web site published grainy but macabre photographs of what it said were the severed heads of the two corpses, which it said would now form a major part of the police investigation.
It said that the first blast at Lubyanka station had been so strong that all that was left of the bomber were her head and legs. The second at Park Kultury was less powerful.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS