Moscow University lecturer Marina Zagrebelnaya was catching the train to work during the city’s peak hour yesterday when a woman in her carriage detonated a belt packed with explosives.

Monday’s double suicide bomb attack killed 38 people.

Ms Zagrebelnaya was still suffering shock and smoke inhalation as she described how the train was ripped apart.

“It was a huge bomb. It was approximately 1.5 metres from me,” she told the BBC.

“And one man who was standing near me, he was like a wall because he was all in blood.

“And all my clothes are just also all in blood.”

The professor was just one of hundreds of train commuters caught up in the double suicide bomb attack, which has left Moscow residents feeling under siege.

“Most of all I felt sorry for those people who were there in the subway at that moment, both for the dead and those alive,” one commuter said.

“Sure I’m frightened to some extent too. But we live in Moscow. It’s like sitting on a powder keg.”

Caucasus blamed

The head of Russia’s federal security bureau, Alexander Bortnikov, has pinned the blame on Islamic rebels from the North Caucasus region, where Russia has been fighting to reassert its control over areas including Chechnya and Ingushetia.

“This is likely to be our main conclusion, because fragments of the bodies of two female suicide bombers were found earlier at the scene of the incident and examinations of the bodies show that these individuals came from the North Caucasus region,” he said.

Sydney University Professor of government and public administration, Graeme Gill, agrees.

“The Caucasus groups are the most likely ones because they are the ones who have been involved in this before,” he said.

“The use of women as carriers of bombs is again something that has been typical of these sorts of groups.

“Now certainly there are other groups in Russia, some of whom are pretty loony. But none of them has actually gone out and done this sort of activity before. It would be new if it was another group doing it.”

Professor Gill says the rebels may be showing they can still fight back after a recent Russian military crackdown.

“Things have been relatively quiet [in the Caucasus] in the sense that while conflict goes on, there’s a sort of a low-level guerrilla war going on there rather than the mass movement of troops like before,” he said.

“The Russian government has been saying for some time that it is now under control and this clearly suggests that things aren’t as under control as they were.”

Fear breeding terrorism

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has vowed to hunt down those responsible for the attacks.

But with Russia talking tough on terrorists, human rights activists are concerned about reprisal attacks against people from Chechnya and Ingushetia.

Andrei Mironov, who works for the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, has just visited the Caucasus. He says people there live in fear, which only plays in to the hands of those recruiting terrorists.

“Their basic sense of despair, I think this is fertile soil for terrorism,” he said.

“Even the president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, [said]: we will not put them on trial. We will just kill them.”