MOSCOW (AFP) – Russian investigators have identified one of the female suicide bombers who carried out the Moscow metro bombings as the 17-year-old widow of a Caucasus militant, the Kommersant daily reported Friday.
The bomber was named as Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, the 17-year-old widow of a Dagestani Islamist rebel killed in 2009, Umalat Magomedov, Kommersant reported, citing investigators in Dagestan.
The newspaper published a photograph of the baby-faced Abdurakhmanova in an Islamic headscarf with Magomedov. Both are posing casually with pistols.
It was unclear whether the couple were formally married. Magomedov does not wear a ring in the photograph. Kommersant writes that Abdurakhmanova may have another surname, Abdulayev.
Abdurakhmanova comes from the Khasavyurtovsky district of Dagestan and met Magomedov at the age of 16 after she contacted rebels on the Internet, Kommersant reported.
Magomedov was killed in a special operation on December 31, 2009, it said.
Abudurakhmanova has been preliminarily identified from photographs, the newspaper wrote.
Russian investigators believe that Abdurakhmanova was responsible for the first of the double suicide blasts on Monday which together killed 39 people
The bombings sent a chill across Russia, recalling the string of suicide attacks carried out earlier in the decade by the so-called "Black Widows", women were found to have been relatives of men killed by Russian forces.Related article:War-scarred youth primed to rebel in Russian Caucasus
Investigators have not identified the second bomber, but one version is that she was a Chechen woman called Markha Ustarkhanova who was also married to a Caucasus militant, Kommersant reported.
The Russian authorities have released grisly photographs showing the severed heads of the two women's corpses, which are the prime evidence in the police investigation.
Also Friday Russian news agencies, citing security forces, said police defused a large bomb in the North Caucasus region of Dagestan on the same day that suicide bombers killed 12 people in the region.
Police found the "powerful bomb" on Wednesday evening in a cemetery in the Kizlyar district of Dagestan, the RIA Novosti news agency reported, adding that the bomb hidden inside a metal bucket was packed with metal nuts and bolts.
In a deadly blast earlier Wednesday in Kizlyar, a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up when police tried to stop it for a regular check.
Minutes later, a suicide bomber in police uniform approached police working at the scene and triggered a second explosion.
The two blasts killed 12 people including nine police, one of whom was a local police chief.
The Dagestan blasts came two days after Monday's double suicide bombings in the Moscow metro killed 39 people.
Underlining the instability, two people were killed in the Khasavurtsky district of Dagestan overnight Wednesday to Thursday when their car packed with explosives blew up.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flew to Dagestan Thursday for a surprise visit in which he met regional officials and police and urged tough anti-terror measures.
Russia has for years battled Islamist insurgents in the North Caucasus Muslim regions of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia but Monday's attacks were the first time in six years that such violence has spread to the capital.
