The woman suspected of carrying out a suicide bombing on a bus in Volgograd adopted a conservative version of Islam after marrying for the second time, her mother said Tuesday in an interview published Tuesday.
Naida Asiyalova, a 30-year-old woman from the village of Gunib in Dagestan, moved to Moscow seven years ago to work as a store clerk, her mother told Izvestia.
First, she married a Turkish man she met in the city, then divorced him, the mother, Ravzat Asiyalova, said.
"Then she married again, a Russian," Ravzat said. "That's when she started wearing the hijab, started praying, and I don't like those hijabs, so I kept telling her to take it off."
Mother and daughter all but broke off contact with each other due to persistent arguments about Naida's new lifestyle.
"She didn't call me, because she didn't want to listen to me and get upset," Ravzat said. "Because of her hijab and her beliefs we always argued."
Officials said that Naida's second husband, Dmitry Sokolov, who was 10 years her junior, had converted to Islam and became an explosives expert for a rebel group in Dagestan.
Sokolov might have made the bomb that killed at least six people, including Naida, and injured 40 others on Monday, an unidentified law enforcement official told Interfax.
The bomb contained 600 grams of TNT and was packed with metal screws and bolts, Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said. A grenade was also found unexploded at the scene of the explosion.
A search is currently under way to establish the whereabouts of Sokolov.
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