Explosions rock Moscow subway. Over 40 dead, so far..

I was going to post something else but this just came in and I have been away for a few hours. China Confidential has a great report and looks a bit into the not so distant past in regard to Russia's battle with terrorism and Islamic terrorists.

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Latest update: Women suicide bombers kill dozens in Moscow attacks Times online




Explosions rock Moscow subway, terrorism suspected.

China Confidential, 1:30 AM UPDATE: AT LEAST 41 KILLED. TWO BLASTS CONFIRMED.

Death toll in explosion at Moscow's central Lubyanka metro station rises to 25--TASS, quoting Emergency Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova.

The huge blast occurred at 7:50 AM on Monday, during rush hour, when thousands of passengers were packed onto trains.

Andrianova says the dead include 14 people who were in the train's second car where the blast occurred and 11 people who were waiting on the platform of the station.

A second explosion happened at the Park Kultury station, about 40 minutes later, Russian news agency Tass reported.

Suicide Bombings Suspected

Interfax says the blasts may have been caused by suicide bombers.

The headquarters of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the Soviet-era KGB, is located just above the Lubyanka station.

Today's explosions follow the Islamist bombing of the Nevsky Express passenger train last November, which killed 27 people and injured 90.

As China Confidential reported in December, the bombing of the Nevsky, a Moscow-Saint Petersburg luxury train that is popular with businesspeople and tourists, raised fears of a resurgence of Islamist terrorist attacks in Moscow and other major cities.

Russia was hit hard by Islamist terrorism in the 1990s and the early years of this decade, but the violence has largely been confined to the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region since 2004.

Sixty people were injured in an attack on the Nevsky Express in August 2007. Fifteen people were injured in the 2005 bombing of a train headed to Moscow from Chechnya, and a suicide attack in the Moscow metro killed 41 and injured approximately 120 in 2004.

Here is more from the NYT:
Twin Subway Blasts Kill at Least 20 in Moscow
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW — Huge explosions during morning rush hour in two subway stations in central Moscow killed more than 20 people on Monday, officials said, raising fears of a renewal of terrorism here.

The causes of the blasts were not immediately clear, but the government said it suspected suicide bombers, Russian news agencies reported.

The subway system, one of the world’s most extensive, had been subjected to attacks related to the separatist war in Chechnya in the early part of the last decade.

Officials said the first explosion Monday occurred at 7:50 a.m. in the Lubyanka subway station, killing people both on the platform and aboard an incoming train. Numerous others were injured.

“The blast hit the second carriage of a metro train that stopped at Lubyanka,” Irina Andrianova, a spokeswoman for the emergency ministry, told Reuters.

About 40 minutes later, another explosion occurred in the second car of a train at the Park Kultury station, officials said. The number of casualties was not immediately known.

In September 2004, a suicide bomber killed at least 9 other people and wounded more than 50 outside the Rizhskaya subway. In February of that same year, a woman carrying a bomb destroyed another subway car, killing at least 41 people as the train moved between the Paveletskaya and the Avtozavodskaya stations at one of the busiest times of the day.

The Lubyanka station, where the first explosion occurred, takes its name from the infamous Lubyanka prison that also served as the former headquarters of the K.G.B., the Soviet-era secret police.