MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pledged Tuesday to drag “from the bottom of the sewers” those behind the deadly attack on the Moscow subway system, but some Russians began to challenge his government for failing to prevent the suicide bombings despite signs that Islamist rebels had been preparing to strike.
As the nation observed a day of mourning and nervous Muscovites returned to the subway, public debate shifted toward how the Kremlin should respond to Monday’s bombings and whether Russia’s powerful security services could have stopped the attack, which killed 39 people and injured more than 70.
Early today reports of another suicide bombing again rattled the country. Russian officials say two suicide bombings in the southern province of Dagestan killed at least nine people including two policemen.
A regional Interior Ministry spokesman told The Associated Press that the blasts occurred this morning in the town of Kizlyar, near Dagestan’s border with Chechnya.
Police pulled over a suspicious-looking car, when the driver detonated explosives. As police officers and residents gathered at the scene there was a second blast.
In response to Monday’s bombings, Internet users flooded President Dmitry Medvedev’s blog with notes of sympathy for families of the victims but also blunt criticism of law enforcement agencies. Some accused police of being more interested in collecting bribes than tracking down terrorists. Others asked why modern equipment to detect explosives had not been installed as promised after the last subway bombing in Moscow nearly six years ago.
“Was it just talk and forget, as always?” one commenter wrote. “The impression is that today’s tragedy on the Moscow subway is the direct result of the ‘efficient’ spending of budget funds by the senior ranks of the police.”
Gennady Gudkov, a member of Putin’s ruling party on the security committee in the lower house of parliament, said the criticism was natural because the attack was “the direct result of mistakes and miscalculations by the security services” and “everybody believes the state should protect them.”
“The problem of terrorism has been unsolved all these years. It’s a legitimate question for Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev,” he said, arguing that the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, had failed to develop intelligence sources in the insurgency in the North Caucasus that has been linked to the bombings.
The Kremlin said it planned to propose new legislation to fight terrorism but provided no specifics.
