President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the creation of a new anti-terrorism unit in the restive North Caucasus on Wednesday as new details emerged about the Moscow suicide bombers.
Medvedev told Federal Security Service director Alexander Bortnikov, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin to create the permanent unit by April 19, the Kremlin said Wednesday on its web site.
The new group will be tasked with preventing terrorist attacks like last week's twin bombings in the Moscow metro that killed 40 people and injured 121 others.
The two women who carried out the bombings have been identified as natives of Dagestan.
One of them, Mariam Sharipova, a 28-year-old schoolteacher who struck the Lubyanka metro station, was the wife of a senior Dagestani rebel, Magomedali Vagapov, who remains alive, the National Anti-Terrorist Committee said.
Investigators are checking whether Sharipova's brother Anvar, a Moscow resident, might have masterminded the March 29 bombings, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported Tuesday, without citing anyone.
Investigators have information that Sharipova and Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, the 17-year-old woman who struck the Park Kultury metro station, contacted Anvar by cell phone shortly before the bombings, the newspaper said.
Anvar, 34, lives in Moscow with his wife and works at a gas station, Sharipova's father, Rasul Magomedov, told Kommersant in an interview published Wednesday.
The father told MK that Anvar stopped answering his phone after the bombings.
FSB investigators in Dagestan are examining the possibility that the two suicide bombers were recruited by Ibragim Gadzhidadayev, who became the leader of Dagestan's rebels in February after the previous leader, Abdurakhmanova's husband Umalat Magomedov, was killed by security services in a special operation on Dec. 31, MK said.
The FSB previously investigated Sharipova's brothers, Anvar and Ilyas, 30, on suspicion of being in cahoots with the rebels, MK said. But no charges are outstanding against the brothers, their father told MK.
The father said Anvar was abducted and severely beaten by law enforcement officers in 2005, while Ilyas has served nine months in prison after having been convicted of illegally possessing a grenade.
He said Ilyas is living at home with him and his mother in the Dagestani village of Balakhani. But neighbors, who asked for anonymity, told MK that Ilyas had joined a rebel group "in the forest."
The father told MK and Komsomolskaya Pravda in interviews published Tuesday that Ilyas was unable to speak with reporters. The father did not explain why.
The neighbors said Sharipova and Abdurakhmanova visited Balakhani together a short time before the bombings.
But the father denied that Abdurakhmanova had visited. He said he last saw his daughter at home three days before the bombings.
He said he has asked the Dagestani branch of the FSB to return his daughter's remains for burial. The law, however, bans relatives of terrorists from receiving their remains.
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