Two female suicide bombers have blown themselves up aboard packed underground trains at the height of the rush hour in Moscow this morning, killing 38 people and leaving an estimated 65 injured, according to the Russian security service.

President Dimitri Medvedev is due to make a television address later today. He has already pledged no let up in the war against terrorism and promised a security crackdown on public transport.

The first blast came at the Lubyanka station in central Moscow at around 8am (0400 GMT), killing 24 people. The station is deep below the headquarters of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the Soviet-era KGB, and is just yards away from the Kremlin.

Around 40 minutes later the second explosion happened a 15 minute journey away at Park Kultury station, near Gorky Park, killing around 12. Both stations are situated on Moscow's busy Red underground line, or line number one.
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A report of a third attack at Prospekt Mira station was not confirmed. Much of the city's underground system is still running despite the attacks.

The blasts have brought the Russian capital to a standstill, with parts of the sprawling Metro system halted in case of further attacks and traffic gridlocked. Emergency services were calling in helicopters to take the wounded to hospital, amid delays in bringing some of the injured to the surface.

An emergency meeting was convened at the Kremlin, where Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the FSB, told Mr Medvedev that the bombers were probably Chechens, based on a preliminary examination of their body parts scattered at the scene of the explosion. He did not elaborate.

Mr Medvedev told security chiefs: "The policy to suppress terrorism in our country and the fight with terrorism will be continued. We will continue the operation against terrorists without hesitation and until the end."

Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, is being kept informed about the attacks while on a trip to Siberia. Mr Putin cemented his power in 1998 by launching a bloody but successful war to overthrow the separatist government in Grozny, the Chechen capital.

Irina Andrianova, a Russian Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman, said that in both cases the blast happened inside the carriage of a Metro train after it had pulled into a station, so that commuters were killed both on the packed platforms and inside the trains.

An FSB source said that the blasts were caused by two women wearing belts packed with explosives. "The characteristics of the injuries of the dead and injured people along with the marks inside the attacked carriages tell us that the bombs were activated by suicide bombers," said the source. "Of course, we will know for sure only after all the necessary tests, but the preliminary information is that there were women suicide bombers behind the attacks."

Female bombers, calling themselves Black Widows and claiming to avenge the tens of thousands of the men killed in Russia's two Chechen wars of the 1990s, have in the past been a feared aspect of Chechen terrorism.

So if we took away woman's rights in russia this never would have happened?

This BBC article states:

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I'm not sure where the black widows came from.