President Dmitry Medvedev said he would track down and punish those behind a suicide bombing at Russia’s largest airport, Domodedovo, yesterday, killing 35 people and injuring more than 150.
He ordered increased security at transport hubs and public meeting places and said management at the airport should take responsibility for security breaches which led to the bombing.
The explosion "shows that there were obvious violations in provision of security," he said. "Everybody who makes decisions there, and the management of the airport, itself should be responsible for it." He ordered Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika see if security rules were properly observed.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vowed revenge for the attack. "This was an abominable crime in both its senselessness and its cruelty," Mr Putin told a meeting of ministers in Moscow.
"I do not doubt that this crime will be solved and that retribution is inevitable. The task of the government is to extend support to the families of the dead and injured."
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for yesterday's attack but the action bore many of the hallmarks of militants fighting for an Islamist state in the North Caucasus region, on Russia's southern frontiers.
US president Barack Obama condemned the "outrageous act of terrorism" and offered Moscow help. Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was shocked, state TV said.
Mr Putin, the more powerful in Russia's 'tandem' political leadership, built his early reputation as a strong leader by launching a war in late 1999 to crush a rebel government in the Northern Caucasus's Chechnya region. That campaign achieved its immediate aim, but since then, insurgency has spread to neighbouring Ingushetia and Dagestan.
It has also assumed a more ruthless edge, spawning hardline factions difficult to monitor. Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev have said they would crush the rebel movements, but their control in the region has sometimes looked tenuous.
"These would likely (but not necessarily) be Islamists from the Northern Caucasus. If so, yet another example of the proposition that success in Chechnya has generated a more diffuse and dangerous threat," said Neil MacFarlane, Professor of International Relations, St. Anne's College, Oxford.
"The consequences? More abuse of people of Caucasian origin in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia...more intense military/police response in the region will make the problem more severe rather than less, because of the methods that are likely to be employed, and the obligation to revenge."
The spread of violence from the North Caucasus, where it is fed by a cocktail of corruption, poverty and clan rivalries as well as religious radicalism, fans Russian nationalist militancy in the heartland.
Tensions between ethnic Russians and the 20 million Muslims who make up one seventh of Russia's population flared dramatically last month in a string of clashes, which involved thousands of Russian nationalists who attacked passersby of non-Slavic appearance, many of them from the North Caucasus.
Agencies