Moscow: Russian investigators have identified one of the women suicide bombers who carried out the Moscow metro attacks as the 17-year-old widow of a Caucasus militant, Kommersant daily reported on Friday.
The bomber was named as Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova. The newspaper published a photograph of the baby-faced teenager in an Islamic headscarf with her late husband Umalat Magomedov. Both are posing casually with pistols.
Magomedov was a Dagestani Islamist rebel killed in a special operation last year, the newspaper reported citing investigators in Dagestan.
It was unclear whether the couple were formally married. Magomedov does not wear a ring in the photograph. Kommersant said 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.
Abudurakhmanova has been preliminarily identified from photographs, the newspaper wrote.
Her name Dzhennet, found among Muslim women in Russia, is derived from the Arabic word Jannat, meaning paradise.
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.
Investigators have not officially 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.
Ustarkhanova, 20, is the widow of a rebel from the Chechen town of Gudermes, Said-Emin Khizriyev, Kommersant reported.
Khrizriyev was killed in October last year as he prepared an assassination attempt on Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
Ustarkhanova is listed as a missing in Chechnya. Her parents said she went missing last summer after contacting rebels and later contacted them saying that she had married Khizriyev, Kommersant reported.
The two women who staged the bombings are believed to have taken a bus from the Dagestan town of Kizlyar, where a double suicide bombing killed 12 on Wednesday.
Kizlyar is just over the regional border from Chechnya and has good train and bus connections to the Russian capital, Kommersant said. It said the women were trained in the Vedensky district of Chechnya.
The two women are believed to have arrived in Moscow by bus early Monday just before carrying out the attacks at two subway stations, reports have said.
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.
Bureau Report
