“I’ll kill you all!”

Unhurt, Zhilenkov climbed to his feet to find his coat spattered with the blood and flesh of others. “I was looking toward a dark-skinned man when it happened. I think it was the suitcase standing next to him that exploded.”

Unconfirmed reports tonight said that investigators had found among the carnage the head of a 30- to 35-year-old man who is thought to have been the suicide bomber. They estimate he detonated the equivalent of 7kg of TNT.

Some witnesses told Russian TV’s Vesti news programme that before detonating the explosives the bomber shouted: “I’ll kill you all!”…

A man called Viktor, who had just emerged from the building when the blast hit, told reporters: “There was an explosion, a bang.

“Then I saw a policeman running out and shouting. He was covered in blood and lumps of flesh. He was just crying, ‘I survived, I survived!'”