Best news day

Mass murder left few traces on the Moscow Metro yesterday but the evidence was visible in the eyes of passengers at the stations where the two suicide bombers had struck.

Commuters left flowers and lit candles at memorials marking the scenes of the explosions at Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations. The normal bustle of the morning rush had given way to subdued reflections of what they had avoided 24 hours earlier.

Some passengers struggled to control their emotions as they tried to restore the routine of their daily journey to work by shuffling quickly past the spots where the terrorists had struck. Others stared in quiet contemplation at the rising mounds of carnations and roses left by mourners.

The trains were not as full as usual but large crowds still passed through the stations, if less from any sense of defiance as from a lack of alternative means to get to work.

The strain showed in the drawn faces of people who remembered past horrors and wondered if they would be obliged to try to live through them again. The usual animated chatter of friends on the escalators had been replaced with a grim silence.

One man crossed himself three times as the escalator carried him from Lubyanka towards the street. Behind him, a young woman stared ahead, crying silently. On the platform level below, a television screen normally used to broadcast advertisements carried a single message in black and white: “Moscow is grieving”.

Yulia Kirilchevo crossed herself after laying carnations at a memorial. She told The Times: “I normally go through this station to work but I just happened to take a different route yesterday. It was luck or fate I suppose, otherwise I would have been here.”

There was a heavy police presence throughout the Metro, including officers with machineguns and sniffer dogs. One of the “Black Widow” bombers detonated her bomb 20 paces from a police control station at Lubyanka, however, illustrating the near-impossibility of securing such a vast network.

At Park Kultury, the rush of trains arriving every 90 seconds or so blew a sweet perfume along the platform from flowers piled high on two tables, as people paused to take pictures of the symbols of mourning on their phones.

One woman, who would give her name only as Nadezhda, dabbed her eyes constantly with a tissue as she stared at the memorial. She told The Times: “I came through here yesterday ten minutes before the explosion – any of us could have been killed. As soon as I got to work, I was desperately calling my son to make sure he was also all right.

“We have survived so many explosions in this city, but this is still a huge tragedy. What can you say about the people who did this? Anybody who could do such a thing cannot even be described as people.”

The death toll from the terror attacks rose to 39 today after one of the injured died in hospital. A day of mourning has been declared in Moscow and worshippers filled churches to offer prayers for the victims.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former President of the Soviet Union, urged people not to succumb to panic and called for “the most resolute measures” to defeat terrorism. He said: “It would be a mistake to yield to this provocation and to display one’s confusion even for one minute.”

A Moscow psychiatric clinic reported that it had received 600 calls on a hotline set up to help victims and their relatives. The capital’s traffic, always bad, grew even worse this morning as many opted to avoid the Metro and go to work by car.

Major arteries into the city centre were jammed well into the mid-morning as the road system strained under the surge of additional vehicles.

Amid the sorrow there was anger too as unofficial taxi drivers reportedly took advantage of the tragedy to hike prices as much as twenty-fold for commuters left stranded by the bombings yesterday. The Gazeta.ru news site reported that drivers were charging up to $100 for trips that normally cost only $5.