Investigators said one of the two suicide bombers who struck the Moscow metro last week was the 17-year-old widow of an Islamic militant killed on New Year's Eve.
The woman, Dagestani native Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, died when explosives she was carrying detonated at the Park Kultury metro station last Monday, the Investigative Committee said in a statement Friday.
The two bombers killed at least 40 commuters on the metro's Red Line, including a 51-year-old man who died in the hospital on Friday. The Emergency Situations Ministry on Sunday raised the number of injured to 121.
Abdurakhmanova was the widow of senior Dagestani rebel Umalat Magomedov, also known as Al Bar, who was killed by the security services in a special operation on Dec. 31, a source in the National Anti-Terrorism Committee told Interfax.
State television on Friday broadcast a photo of Abdurakhmanova with her husband. Abdurakhmanova is wearing a black Muslim headscarf and clutching a Makarov pistol. Her husband is embracing her and holding a Stechkin gun.
The second suicide bomber, who struck at the Lubyanka metro station, has not been officially identified yet. But Novaya Gazeta reported Sunday that she was a 28-year-old computer science teacher from the Dagestani village of Balakhany, Mariam Magomedova.
"My wife and I immediately recognized our daughter Mariam. When my wife last saw our daughter she was wearing the same red scarf we saw in the pictures," her father, Rasul Magomedov, told the newspaper after being shown photos of the bomber's remains.
He said his daughter had told him that she did not have links to Islamic militants, as claimed by local security forces when one of her brothers was detained on suspicion of being a militant and allegedly tortured before most charges were dropped.
Kommersant earlier identified the second bomber as Markha Ustarkhanova, the missing 20-year-old widow of Chechen rebel Said-Emin Khizriyev, who was killed in October after law enforcement agencies received a tip that he was preparing to assassinate Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. But a Chechen law enforcement source told RIA-Novosti that Ustarkhanova was not one of the bombers.
Investigators have found an apartment near Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge in south-central Moscow where the bombs were assembled by two male accomplices, Interfax reported. The two men met the female bombers near the Vorobyovy Gory metro station — which is on the Red Line in the south of Moscow — and accompanied them on their last ride, the report said.
"These two accomplices detonated the explosives remotely," an unidentified law enforcement official told Interfax.
A commuter injured in the Park Kultury explosion, a 23-year-old Malaysian medical student, said Abdurakhmanova was standing alone near the door of the train car, wearing a bulky purple jacket and no scarf. "Her eyes were very open, like on drugs, and she barely blinked, and it was scary," the student, Sim Eih Xing, told The Moscow Times in an interview last week.
Initial reports identified Abdurakhmanova as the bomber at the Lubyanka station.
Investigators believe a suspected associate of the suicide bombers might be Pavel Kosolapov, a Volgograd native accused of masterminding a series of deadly bombings, including an explosion on a train traveling between the Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya metro stations in February 2004, a suicide attack outside the Rizhskaya metro station in August 2004 and Nevsky Express train bombings in 2007 and 2009, Gazeta.ru reported.
Kosolapov remains at large.
Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov has claimed responsibility for the Moscow metro bombings and said they were retaliation for the killing of four garlic pickers by special forces in Ingushetia in February.
Militants also are believed to be behind a series of subsequent bombings in the North Caucasus, including twin attacks in Dagestan on Wednesday that killed 10 people and two explosions that derailed a freight train in Dagestan on Sunday.
President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday called on the State Duma to support tougher measures against terrorists but was firm that a moratorium on capital punishment would not be lifted despite calls to the contrary.
"Those who committed the terrorist attacks will be held responsible, but as for the death penalty — here we have our obligations," Medvedev said at a Kremlin meeting with the heads of the Duma factions. Russia introduced the moratorium in 1997 as part of its obligations as a member of the Council of Europe.
Medvedev said law enforcement agencies should adopt a "merciless" attitude toward those who help terrorists. "I believe that for terrorism we need to create a model where anyone who helps terrorists — be it cooking soup for them or doing their laundry — will have committed a legally defined crime," he said.
Medvedev said he might consider proposing amendments to the Criminal Code to change the legal definitions of terrorism.
State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, who leads the pro-Kremlin United Russia faction in the Duma, expressed a willingness to support the tougher measures. "Those who plan bombings, including in the metro, should be destroyed without any doubt," he said.
Gryzlov also complained that the newspapers Vedomosti and Moskovsky Komsomolets had helped the terrorists by publishing critical articles last week.
Meanwhile, the authorities are finalizing a three-color terror alert system similar to those used in the United States and Britain, said Anatoly Safonov, a special presidential envoy for international cooperation in fighting terrorism. Green would signify "dangerous," orange would mean "high," and red would mean "threatening," Interfax reported.
Police were on high alert over the Easter holiday weekend, with officers accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs deployed to many Moscow metro stations. About 3,200 officers were dispatched to keep an eye on Moscow churches and, for the first time, metal detectors were set up outside churches and cemeteries.
Amid the high security, thousands of Orthodox believers flocked to churches to celebrate Jesus' resurrection. A total of 176,500 people took part in Easter celebrations in Moscow, compared with 112,000 people last year, police said.
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