The chief of the National Anti-Terrorism Committee and Russia's top security official ordered additional security measures Tuesday in the wake of a suspected bomb attack on a train Monday night.
The Moscow-St. Petersburg train was derailed half way between the two cities on the country's busiest rail route, leaving 60 injured with 30 hospitalized. The incident left a crater in the track, and prosecutors are considering a terrorist attack as a possible cause of the accident.
"Anti-terrorist commissions all over Russia must provide comprehensive measures to prevent subversive activities at vulnerable key facilities, including places where there are lots of people," Nikolai Patrushev, also head of the Federal Security Service, told his colleagues at a anti-terrorism committee session.
Since the bloody school siege in Beslan in 2004, which officially claimed 331 lives, Russia has not witnessed any major terrorist attacks.
Patrushev said the threat of extremism and terrorism in Russia was still real, even though security forces had managed to reduce levels in 2006-07.
"The past two months saw an increase in the number of attacks on ... officials in North Caucasus republics," Patrushev said.
Russia went through a series of brutal bomb attacks in the period from 1999 to 2004. The federal authorities blamed the militants in Chechnya for the incidents, saying they sought revenge for the Kremlin-led campaigns against separatists in the troubled republic in the 1990s.
