RUSSIA: The snow still slanted across the red star above the Kremlin and frosted the glittering Christmas trees beside Moscow's flashiest thoroughfare.
Traffic rumbled relentlessly past Red Square, the parliament building and the Bolshoi theatre: an ordinary December evening in the centre of this city of 10 million.
Only a cordoned-off street corner opposite the Kremlin walls, beneath the gaping window frames of the five-star Hotel National, suggested something was amiss in the heart of the Russian capital.
"We should be used to it now, but it's still awful," said Ms Nadezhda Likhacheva, a cleaner heading home. "If the terrorists can get here, they can get anywhere."
Officials blamed Chechen rebels for yesterday's attack, when at least one woman blew herself up outside the Hotel National, killing six people, injuring 14 others and leaving body parts and debris scattered across the road.
The Le Royal Meridien group, owner of the National, describe it on its website as "one of the most fashionable and prestigious hotels in Moscow", offering "comfortable, luxurious and secure accommodation in the very centre of the Russian capital".
Its well-heeled guests gazed at the shattered windows and mangled limousines yesterday, as stunned as the locals at the audacity of the attack. The first people on the scene talked of broken bodies in the snow, a security guard with his legs torn away, of flesh blown across the street and a severed head lying beside a black briefcase.
The National stands on the corner of Tverskaya street where Moscow's glitterati sashay past ragged homeless as the road rises westwards from Red Square.
On the same street in July, a Chechen woman was arrested after dumping a bag outside a café and fleeing. A bomb- disposal expert was killed trying to defuse the explosives inside.
Five days earlier, two Chechen women blew up themselves and 15 others at an open-air rock festival at a Moscow airfield. Law enforcers went on the alert to attacks by what they call Chechnya's "black widows".
They first appeared in the capital in October 2002, when rebels seized the Dubrovka theatre for three days. Television footage showed women sitting among the 800 hostages, their faces veiled by headscarves, with explosives strapped to their waists and clutching remote- control triggers.
Chechnya's women had begun fighting for independence alongside their men and Russians faced a new and terrifying threat to their security. That threat returned to Moscow yesterday.
"People prepare these women for this," said Moscow Mayor Mr Yuri Luzhkov, "men from the mountains who used consider women the most sacred thing and now force them to fight in their place."
Officials say foreign Islamic extremists brought suicide attacks to the Chechen conflict. Many Chechens say the women are the widows of guerrillas or civilians tortured and murdered by Russian soldiers.
"They've come here for revenge and how can the police stop them? Check everyone in the street?"asked Mr Yuri Perminov, a businessman walking past the Bolshoi theatre. "We have to be ready for anything."