Amid the jostling crowds squeezing their way on to the packed train at Lubyanka, no one gave the silent, bulkily dressed woman a second glance. It was minutes before 8 o’clock and she was just one of the seven million passengers due on the Moscow Metro that day.
Seconds later, before the train had left the station platform, she detonated her explosives, sending glass and twisted metal ripping through the carriage and filling the air with screams and smoke.
Alexandra Antonova heard the explosion as her train was speeding away, the last to leave Lubyanka before the bomb. “The explosion deafened me, but the train didn’t stop,” she said. “Nobody had time to understand what had happened.”
Back at the station, passengers screamed in terror and fled through the dense smoke for the exits. As the smoke cleared, mangled corpses lay scattered in and around the train. Some of the dead sat slumped in their seats. The walking wounded joined the exodus, leaving trails of their blood along the platform.
Ludmilla Famokatovo, who sells newspapers outside Lubyanka, was struck by the absence of panic among the crowds streaming out of the station. But she noticed the tears. “One man was weeping, crossing himself,” she said. “He was saying 'Thank God, I survived'.”
Others had already progressed to anger. One man, the boyfriend of a woman seriously injured in the blast, swore vengeance against all Muslims and showed off blood on his hands that he claimed had come from punching a Muslim passer-by in the face.
“I am going to kill one of them. A Tajik, an Azerbajani, it does not matter, they are all the same,” he spat at journalists gathering in Lubyanka Square. “War is going to begin.”
Within half an hour, the second bomb exploded on a train farther down the same line at Park Kultury, the station closest to Gorky Park.
Alexandra Antonova had passed through moments before, having arrived on the last train to leave Lubankya before the blast there.
“I was in the middle of the train when somewhere in the first or second carriage there was a huge blast,” one man told reporters. “I felt the shockwaves reverberate through my body.”
Most of those caught up in the blast at Park Kultury had no idea of the carnage that had just taken place farther up the line. They fled the train screaming and surged along the smoke-filled hallways, fighting to get to safety.
“Everyone was screaming,” Valentin Popov, a student who escaped another train, said. “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 newspaper seller watched the exodus in horror. "I saw dozens of people running out of the Metro. Their faces were black with soot.”
By then, ambulances had started to arrive with doctors to treat the wounded. "I saw a girl with scratches all over her legs, all her stockings were in holes, and a man with a bleeding head. Doctors could not stop the bleeding,” he said.
“Lots of people were in tears when coming out of the Metro. One young man came up to me, he looked normal and OK, was about to say something but just collapsed in front of my eyes – probably because of the shock."
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