ST. PETERSBURG, August 14 (RIA Novosti) - A police spokesperson said photofits have been compiled on two people suspected of setting off a bomb that caused a train derailment in northwest Russia Monday night.
The train hurtled off the rails en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg, the country's busiest rail line. Carriages were overturned, and 60 people were injured. A 2-meter (6-foot) crater was left in the track.
Alexander Bastrykin, a deputy general prosecutor, said investigators considered terrorism to be one of the most likely causes of the incident, but that: "a final conclusion has yet to be reached."
The senior investigator said the bomb that derailed the train near Veliky Novgorod had a yield of three kilograms of TNT equivalent. However, he said it was too early to speak of motives for the crime.
Nikolai Kovalyov, head of the committee for veterans' affairs at the State Duma, parliament's lower house, and a former chief of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), said last night's incident could be connected to a military operation in Ingushetia, a volatile North Caucasus republic, where almost 2,500 Interior Ministry officers have been deployed to fight militants.
"This could have been an attempt to divert attention to another location - a method frequently used by terrorists," Kovalev told RIA Novosti. "Or else there could be quite a trivial explanation of boys playing war games."
Mikhail Grishankov, first deputy chairman of the State Duma's security committee, said: "This was an unusual crime, and it's too early and complicated to speculate. We should wait for the expert report."
Rail authorities throughout the country tightened security measures following the Nevsky Express train incident.
Anti-terrorist measures will be put in place in the Nizhny Novgorod Region on the Volga, a local source said. A spokesperson for the Tyumen department of the Sverdlovsk Railway in West Siberia said extra security measures were in place in the region.
On south Russia's North Caucasus network, reinforced police patrols have been dispatched to key rail facilities and passenger and commuter trains.
The section of track damaged by the blast has been repaired, and the first commuter train passed over the track at 3:50 p.m. (11:50 a.m. GMT). Inter-city train services have resumed, but are running at around nine-hours behind schedule.
