President Dmitry Medvedev vowed to track down and punish those behind the bombing, which also injured about 130 people, including foreigners, during the busy late afternoon at Moscow's Domodedovo airport. Dense smoke filled the hall and a fire burned along one wall.
"The explosion was right near me, I was not hit but I felt the shock wave -- people were falling," said Yekaterina Alexandrova, a translator who was waiting in the crowded arrivals area to meet a client flying in from abroad.
Thick drops of blood were scattered across the snow-covered tarmac outside the arrivals hall, where traces of shrapnel were found.
"I heard a loud boom... we thought someone had just dropped something. But then I saw casualties being carried away," a check-in attendant who gave her name as Elena told Reuters at Domodedovo, which is some 22 km (14 miles) southeast of Moscow.
The Kremlin said Medvedev, who has called the insurgency in the north Caucasus the biggest threat to Russia's security, delayed his departure for the Davos international business forum in Switzerland.
The rebels have vowed to take their bombing campaign from the violence-wracked north Caucasus to the Russian heartland, hitting transport and economic targets. They have also leveled threats at the 2014 Winter Olympics, scheduled for Sochi, a region they claim as part of their "emirate."
"Security will be strengthened at large transport hubs," Medvedev wrote on Twitter. "We mourn the victims of the terrorist attack at Domodedovo airport. The organizers will be tracked down and punished."
Sometimes we forget Russia has had its own terrorism problems for a very long time now, from Chechnya to former Soviet republic border disputes to the deaths of 166 in a Moscow theater in 2002 and the frightfully botched Beslan school siege in 2004 which cost 350 lives, there's been a long string of terrorist violence in Russia over the last dozen years or so.
It's a long and sad history, too.
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Whenever I look forward and try to predict where the kleptocratic mendocracy in the US will lead us, I take a long look at Russia, which has been led by liars and crooks for a long time.
The future doesn't look good for the US, if honest, ethical people don't stand up and throw the bastards out. At least we have a chance; in Russia the honest people are thoroughly bootstomped.
And also, the eyewitness accounts of the Domodedevo bombing in CNN and BBC brought to mind the Fine Restaurant scene in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, several times.
(Gee, that's two references to cinematic political satire in two posts...)
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