“Blasts – revenge for recent anti-terrorist operations”

Georgy Engelhardt, a political expert on Islam, says the attacks could have been in response to recent operations in which high-ranking militants were killed.

“One of the most reasonable explanations is that the terrorists needed to demonstrate their capacities right after the number of problems and losses they suffered during March. They lost quite [well-]known leaders in their ranks. It was received as a serious set-back to the whole jihad movement in the region,” Engelhardt told RT.

Recently, security services have successfully eliminated a number of terrorist leaders, such as Anzor Astemirov, Salambek Akhmadov and Said Buryatsky.

Dmitry Suslov of the council of Foreign and Defense Policy believes this terror attack happened because international terrorist activities has increased in the northern Caucasus as “the effectiveness of state institutions such as police and special forces have been devastated”.

Guillietto Chiesa, former European Parliament member, said that some commentators think this blast in the Moscow Metro is an internal problem of Russia – “a follow-up of the Chechen war”. But Chiesa himself believes “the idea that this is only an internal Russian question would be wrong.”

“We know that the Chechen War is finished from a certain point of view and the possibility to raise such a big terrible action cannot be a question of a little group of people,” he added.

Richard Beeston, an editor for "The Times" in London believes there could be a couple of reasons of the terrorist attack. “One, of course, is publicity. If we suspect that the people responsible came from the northern Caucasus – maybe they want to attract the international attention to the fight they still fighting, which went confined to Chechnya and Ingushetia and the other republics,” he says.

The second, Beeston believes, could be international conflicts: “Obviously we know that there are still strains and conflicts on the way and maybe this is the way of retaliating and stepping-up the campaign against the Russian authorities.”

One should be careful in attributing the Moscow blasts to this or that terror group like Al Qaeda, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen told RT.

“Certainly, we have people here in Washington … who are suggesting the Al Qaeda is now franchising its operations like McDonalds around the world,” he said. “I have to say it serves some interest to try to paint all these groups as a monolithic enemy when in fact there may be people more interested in trying to tie what happened in Moscow to the Taliban or even Hamas and Hezbollah.”

“We know from history that to paint with this broad brush all these various groups as being under one monolithic leader is usually a fool’s errand,” Madsen added.

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