MOSCOW, Russia (AFP) — Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on packed metro trains in Moscow yesterday, killing at least 38 people near the ex-KGB headquarters and Gorky Park, in attacks blamed on Islamists.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vowed those behind the rush-hour attacks would be “destroyed” as authorities pointed the finger at militants from the Northern Caucasus for the deadliest attack in Moscow for half a decade.

The first explosion shortly before 8:00 am ripped through a train that had stopped in the Lubyanka station just below the headquarters of Russia’s FSB security service, the successor to the Soviet KGB.

About 40 minutes later, a second explosion went off in a carriage of a train on the platform at the Park Kultury metro station, named after Moscow’s iconic Gorky Park.

Rescuers grimly hauled out body bags from the depths of the Moscow metro, one of the world’s biggest transit systems with an average of more than 6.5 million passengers every day, an AFP correspondent saw.

Video footage shot with mobile phones and aired on state television showed dazed passengers holding their heads in despair and corpses strewn on the ground as dust and smoke swirled through the tunnel.

Security services kept a tight cordon around the Lubyanka metro station, as crowds of people sought to call loved ones.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev later visited the metro station to lay a wreath of red roses on the platform, and vowed “we will find and wipe out” those behind the blasts, calling them “wild beasts”.

Officials said the attacks were carried out by women wearing belts packed with explosives, marking a return of the so-called “Black Widows” who terrorised Moscow a decade ago with a string of attacks.

“Body parts of two terrorists — female suicide bombers — were found at the scenes of the blasts,” FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov said in a televised meeting at the Kremlin.

“According to preliminary information, these people had links to places of residence in the Northern Caucasus,” he added.

Bortnikov said the bombers’ belts were packed with the explosive hexogen and metal shrapnel.

They had an explosive force of 8.8 pounds of TNT for the Lubyanka blast and from 3.3 to 4.4 pounds for the explosion at Park Kultury, Bortnikov added.

Alexandra Antonova, an editor for the RIA-Novosti news agency, said she was on a train which had just pulled out of Lubyanka when the blast went off.

“The loud boom stuffed up my ears. But the train didn’t stop. Nobody had time to understand what had happened,” Antonova said.

Emergency officials said the death toll had reached 38, not including the bombers. Another 64 people were wounded.

Officials said 24 were killed in the Lubyanka blast, while 12 were killed in the Park Kultury. An additional two people died in hospital but officials did not specify which station they had come from.

The injured included a woman from the Philippines and two women from Malaysia who were released from hospital after treatment.