Moscow - Russia was again the scene of grisly carnage as two suicide blasts ripped through the packed carriages of separate trains on Moscow's metro during the morning commute on Monday, killing at least 38 people and injuring dozens of others. Judging in part by the severed remains of the two female attackers, Russian officials blamed the coordinated bombings on homegrown Islamist fighters, raising fears that the fighters' vow to escalate their insurgency in the troubled Caucasus region had caused violence to spread to the Russian heartland for the second time in four months. Pointing to a possible motivation behind the attacks was the fact that one of the bombers struck just beneath the headquarters of the FSB, Russia's secret police. Known as the KGB before the fall of the Soviet Union, the agency's harsh security tactics in the isolated Caucasus Mountains have incensed the local separatists. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB agent who later became head of the FSB, has overseen several brutal campaigns against the Islamic fighters, starting with the second Chechen war in 1999 that established his popularity in Russia as an unflinching leader. On Monday, he warned of a new crackdown against those responsible for the bombings. "I am certain that law-enforcement agencies will do everything to find the criminals and bring them to justice. The terrorists will be destroyed," Putin said in televised remarks. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, meanwhile, ordered police to tighten security across the country and urged people to stay calm. "It's absolutely clear that these kinds of acts are well-planned and intended to cause mass shock, to destabilize the country and the society," Medvedev said. The 1999 Chechen war was precipitated by a series of deadly apartment bombings in Russian cities, including Moscow, and human-rights activists have warned that new attacks could lead to more military campaigns in Chechnya or the other violence-wracked parts of the North Caucasus ��" Ingushetia and Dagestan. The insurgents' leader, a warlord named Doku Umarov, renewed his pledge last month to bring "holy war" to Russia's cities and industrial centers in an effort to carve out an Islamic state. "Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns. The war is coming to their cities," Umarov said in an interview posted Feb. 14 on the fighters website www.kavkazcenter.com. "If the Russians think this war is being waged on television screens, somewhere in the far-off Caucasus ... then God willing, we are about to show them that this war is coming to their homes." The government has faced criticism for failing to heed his threats, even after he took responsibility for the bombing of a train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg in November that killed 27 people.
