The Moscow Metro bombings may have a Pakistan connection, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as security experts warned of more terrorist attacks.
Mr. Lavrov suggested that militants operating on the Afghan-Pakistan border may have helped organise the Moscow attacks.
The death toll in Monday's suicide bombing of two Moscow subway stations rose to 39 as a woman wounded in the attack died in hospital on Tuesday. Five victims remain in critical condition and more than 70 in hospital.
“We all know very well that clandestine terrorists are very active in ‘no man's land' on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Mr. Lavrov on the sidelines of a Foreign Ministers meeting of Arctic states in Canada.
“It is there many terrorist attacks carried out not only in Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries, but also in Central Asia and as far as the Caucasus, have been prepared.”
Mr. Lavrov called for closer coordination of international efforts to tract down terrorists and their sources of finance. “It is a global terrorist network and it should be combated globally on the basis of U.N. and other international decisions,” he said.
In the past two months, Russian security services killed two Al-Qaeda emissaries — both of Arab origin — in the entourage of Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov, who proclaimed himself “Emir of the Caucasus” .
Experts did not rule out more terror strikes in Moscow and other Russian cities. Investigation sources told the Kommersant daily that about 30 suicide bombers had recently been trained in Turkey and in North Caucasus. Nine of them have already carried out their missions, including two women suicide bombers who staged Monday's twin attacks. Experts recall that the deadliest bombing of the Moscow Metro in February 2004, which killed 41 people, was followed by a series of suicide attacks in Moscow over the next few months that included the downing of two passenger planes and a bomb blast outside a subway station. The 2004 wave of terror culminated with the seizure of a school in North Ossetia, in which 334 hostages died, including 186 children.
