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Detectives and scenes of crime officers examine the aftermath of the blast at Park Kultury metro station
At the site of the other attack, the city's Lubyanka station officials examine the scene. The station lies beneath the headquarters of the Federal Security Service
Desolate: A wounded woman covered in dust with her left eye blackened outside Park Kultury metro station
A hospital helicopter lands at Zubovsky Boulevard to evacuate the victims from the Park Kultury metro station
Splattered with blood, a wounded man makes a phone call on his mobile outside the Park Kultury metro station shortly after a female suicide bomber blew herself up
In this image from Russia Today television an injured man is treated in an ambulance
Passengers try to make their way out of Prospekt Mira subway station. The attacks happened at the height of the morning rush hour
Desperate: Dead bodies are scattered in the walkway at one of the stations
Massacre: A bloodied passenger is treated on the side of the road
Firefighters carry a body from Lubyanka metro station in Moscow after a female suicide bomber blew herself up during rush hour this morning
A woman breaks down outside Lubyanka station after at least 37 people were killed in two separate suicide bombings in the city
MAP BLAST
* Two bombs, 40mins apart, detonated during morning rush hour
* At least 37 people dead, 65 injured
* No group claims responsibility so far. Rouble falls
Police in Moscow were tonight searching for female accomplices of two women suicide bombers who killed at least 37 people and injured 65 by targeting two packed tube trains during the busy rush hour.
Analysis of CCTV footage inside the Red Arrow underground trains of the two suicide bombers has revealed they were accompanied by two other women.
Their faces were not destroyed in the explosion, increasing the chance of successfully identifying them, and video from other cameras in Moscow Metro stations has also helped identify the faces of the two women who accompanied them and a man.
President Dmitry Medvedev declared Russia would act 'without compromise' to root out terrorists as he ordered airports to be put on alert and security to be stepped up throughout the country.
The two bombs are the worst attack on the Russian capital for six years and no group has yet claimed responsibility.
But suspicion has fallen on Muslim militants from the North Caucasus, where the Kremlin is fighting a growing Islamist insurgency spreading from Chechnya to neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia.
Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia's Federal Security Service, said the terrorists were likely to have been 'black widows', Muslim women radicalised by the situation in the North Caucasus.
'Body parts belonging to two female suicide bombers were found and, according to initial data, these persons are linked to the north Caucasus,' he said.Analysts said the involvement of women was similar to the 'black widows' in Checnya - women who had lost brothers or husbands to Russian forces in the Chechen conflict.
News reports have linked the women, also known as Shahidka, to embattled northern Caucuses and the Shahidka movement that first emerged in 2000.
The term is a feminine derivative of shahid, Arabic for 'witness' or 'martyr'.
They are generally young, often teenagers, and are dressed from head to toe in black mourning clothes.
Police are tonight expected to publish CCTV images of the suicide bombers, along with two women of 'Slav appearance' who accompanied them.
Witnesses spoke of panic at the two underground stations this morning after the blasts as people fell over each other in dense smoke and dust, trying to escape.
In scenes that will have been chillingly familiar to Londoners after the July 7 bombings in 2005, bloodied and injured passengers emerged onto the streets looking bewildered.
The first explosion tore through the second carriage of a metro train just before 8am as it stood at the Lubyanka station, close to the headquarters of Russia's main domestic security service FSB. It killed at least 23 people.
About 40 minutes later, another blast in the second carriage of a train waiting at the Park Kultury metro station, opposite Gorky Park, killed 12 to 14 more people.
Both bombers wore explosive belts packed with bolts and iron rods to maximise casualties.
'It was very scary. I saw a dead body,' said Valentin Popov, a 19-year-old student travelling on a train to the Park Kultury station.
'Everyone was screaming. There was a stampede at the doors. I saw one woman holding a child and pleading with people to let her through, but it was impossible.'
A commuter said: 'I was in the middle of the train when somewhere in the first or second carriage there was a loud blast. I felt the vibrations reverberate through my body.'
The female suicide bombers are believed to have boarded the train at Yugo-Zapadnaya station in southwest Moscow.
One passenger told the RIA news agency: 'I was in the middle of the train when somewhere in the first or second carriage there was a loud blast. I felt the vibrations reverberate through my body.
'People were yelling like hell. There was a lot of smoke and in about two minutes everything was covered in smoke.'
Another called Alexei added: 'I was moving up on the escalator when I heard a loud bang, a blast. A door near the passage way arched, was ripped out and a cloud of dust came down on the escalator.
'People started running, panicking, falling on each other,' he said.
Some of the injured were airlifted to emergency hospitals in helicopters. Dozens of commuters were helped from each station to waiting ambulances.
Surveillance camera footage posted on the internet showed several motionless bodies lying on the floor or slumped against the wall in Lubyanka station lobby and emergency workers crouched over victims, trying to treat them.
Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov told reporters that female suicide bombers had carried out the attacks.
Prosecutors said they had opened a 'terrorism investigation' after forensic experts found the remains of a female bomber.
The Russian rouble fell to 34.25 from 34.13 against the central bank's euro-dollar basket, on concern the blasts could indicate the start of a bombing campaign against Russian cities.
Russian equity markets were little changed, with the rouble denominated MICEX index up 0.04 percent.
Medvedev ordered officials to fight terrorism 'without hesitation, to the end'.
In a nod to accusations of Russian troops acting with brutality against civilians in Chechnya, he said human rights must be respected during police operations.
The President will make a statement to the nation later today, according to a Kremlin source.
Russian President Vladimir Putin cut short a visit to Siberia and vowed that everything would be done to catch the killers.
He said: 'A crime that is terrible in its consequences and heinous in its manner has been committed.
'I am confident that law enforcement bodies will spare no effort to track down and punish the criminals. Terrorists will be destroyed.'
U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the bombings as did European Union leaders.
'The American people stand united with the people of Russia in opposition to violent extremism and heinous terrorist attacks that demonstrate such disregard for human life, and we condemn these outrageous acts,' Obama said.
Gordon Brown was 'appalled' by the attacks and has sent a message of 'condolence and support' to Medvedev, Downing Street said.
The current death toll makes it the worst attack on Moscow since February 2004, when a suicide bombing killed at least 39 people and wounded more than 100 on a metro train.
Chechen separatists were blamed for that attack and suspicions are likely to focus on the North Caucasus where rebel leader Doku Umarov, who is fighting for an Islamic emirate embracing the whole region, vowed on Feb 15 to take the war to Russian cities.
'Blood will no longer be limited to our (Caucasus) cities and towns. The war is coming to their cities,' the Chechen rebel leader said in an interview on the unofficial Islamist website.
The Chechen rebellion began in the 1990s as a largely ethnic nationalist movement, fired by a sense of injustice over the transportation of Chechens to Central Asia, with enormous loss of life, by dictator Josef Stalin.
In recent years, Russian officials say Islamic militants from outside Russia have joined the campaign lending it a new intensity.
Russian leaders had declared victory in their battle with Chechen separatists who fought two wars with Moscow.
But while violence subsided in Chechnya, it has spread and intensified in neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia, where clan rivalries overlap with criminal gangs and Islamist militants.
Vladimir Putin cemented his power in 1999 in launching an ultimately successful war to overthrow a separatist government lodged in the Chechen capital Grozny.
Russian leaders fear the loss of this region endangering energy transit routes could destabilise other areas in a country spanning 11 time zones.
The Moscow subway system is one of the world's busiest, carrying around seven million passengers on an average workday, and is a key element in running the sprawling and traffic-choked city.
The blasts practically paralysed movement on the city centre's main roads, as emergency vehicles sped to the stations.
Helicopters hovered overhead the Park Kultury station area, which is next to the city's renowned Gorky Park.
Passengers, many of them in tears, streamed out of the station, one man exclaiming over and over: 'This is how we live!'
ALL EYES ON CHECHNYA
Although no group has so far claimed responsibility, suspicion will fall on Chechen rebels and other separatist groups in the North Caucasus.
The last confirmed terrorist attack in Moscow was in 2004, when a Chechen suicide bomber blew herself up outside a city subway station, killing 10 people.
Chechnya lies to the south of Russia close to the border withe Georgia.
In February, the Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov warned on a website that 'the zone of military operations will be extended to the territory of Russia ... the war is coming to their cities'.
Russia has been involved in two bitter conflicts in the region in the past 20 years.
Prime Minister Putin has claimed the region is at risk from Islamic terrorism and that giving in to Chechen independence would cause further chaos on Russia's border in the region
New York police doubled patrols of the subway system and sent a battery of police cars to transit hubs as a precaution on Monday following the Moscow subway bombings.
In Washington, police sent bomb-sniffing dogs to random Metro stations and rail yards as part of heightened security associated with the Moscow attacks, in which two female suicide bombers killed at least 38 people on packed metro trains during rush hour on Monday.
Though the Moscow bombings appear related to the conflict in the North Caucasus and New York's greatest threat is seen as coming from al Qaeda, police enacted the same security detail that they roll out after any attack elsewhere in the world.
This time it closely follows one man's admission he was plotting a suicide bombing of New York subways with al Qaeda training.
"We don't have any information suggesting that it's related (to al Qaeda) but as a precaution we are increasing coverage," police spokesman and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said.
The city's fleet of "critical response vehicles" that guard sensitive locations were sent to mass transit hubs such as Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station, Browne said.
Officers patrolling the subways overnight were kept on duty as the morning shift reported, practically doubling the number of officers.
The city may also send a detective to Moscow, as it often does following similar attacks around the world, Browne said.
The New York Police Department has detectives in 11 foreign cities working to prevent foreign extremists from hitting New York, which has been attacked twice -- on September 11, 2001, and in a 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center.
The New York subway system security came under intense scrutiny after the transit attacks on Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005.
On February 22, Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to plotting a suicide bomb attack on New York City subways with al Qaeda training for what would have been the worst attack on the United States since 2001.
"Whether they are related or not our standard operating procedure is to take precautions until more is known," Browne said.
Coincidentally on Monday, Washington's Metro was holding a planned drill simulating a bus explosion in the parking lot of a sports stadium. That coincided with the sweeps of train stations, the locations of which were not being announced in advance.
"When we opened the Metro system this morning, we did so with heightened security," Metro Transit Police Acting Chief Jeri Lee said in a statement. "We remain an open system and we do what we can to be as secure as possible."
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