“I don’t rule out that this is one and the same gang,” Putin said at a televised Cabinet meeting.

President Dmitry Medvedev said later the attacks were “links of the same chain.”

The Moscow subway bombings were the first suicide attacks in the Russian capital in six years and shocked a country that had grown accustomed to having such violence confined to its restive southern corner. Those attacks followed a warning from an Islamic militant leader that the militants would bring their struggle to the heart of Russia.

On Wednesday, a suicide bomber in a car detonated explosives when police tried to stop the car in the town of Kizlyar near Dagestan’s border with Chechnya, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said.

written by ylb