Suicide bombers on the loose in Moscow, claim newspapers

1.00pm - By ANDREW OSBORN in Moscow


Fears were growing yesterday that two female Chechen suicide bombers are on the loose in Moscow less than a week after two passenger airliners were blown out of the sky.

The two prime suspects in last week's explosions have been identified as Chechens Amant Nagaeva and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova. Both had lost brothers in Chechnya's hostilities with Russia.

Remains of the two women's bodies were found in the wreckage of both planes, along with traces of a high explosive favoured by Chechen separatists. Eighty-nine people died in the almost simultaneous explosions.

Daily Izvestia reported yesterday, however, that the two women did not travel to Moscow alone. Instead, said the paper, they came with two other Chechen women who they had been living with in Grozny, Chechnya's capital.

The two women were named as Maryam Taburova and Roza Nagaeva (Amant's sister). All four women were last seen taking a bus from Dagestan to an unknown destination on August 22, two days before the planes were blown up.

All four are either divorced or single and worked as market traders in Grozny's central market selling children's clothes which they obtained on monthly shuttle trips to the Azerbaijani capital, Baku.

A photo of Taburova was splashed on Izvestia's front page yesterday under the chilling headline: "Another two suicide bombers."

The paper interviewed the two dead women's relatives in Chechnya who suggested that they had been murdered and their passports used by suicide bombers.

Izvestia agreed that there were only two possibilities; that the four were genuine suicide bombers or "shakhidkas" controlled by terrorists in Baku or that their identities had been stolen by the Baku-based terrorists who had murdered them. The truth might emerge, it added, when the gruesome remains of Amant and Satsita are positively identified by their relatives.

Komsomolskaya Pravda published a grim photograph of Amant's headless skinless corpse yesterday that was barely recognisable as a human being. It claimed investigators had found a note in Arabic among her personal effects reading "Allah Akbar!" ("Allah is Great"), the traditional rallying cry of Chechen separatist fighters.

Investigators have said they may need as much as six weeks to piece together a full picture of exactly how and why the two planes were targeted.

There was confusion yesterday over the treatment that Russian airliners will receive in US airspace. The Washington Post has reported that they will be escorted by fighter jets primed to shoot them down if they are hijacked but the Russian Foreign Ministry said yesterday it had received no such official notification.

In Chechnya, meanwhile, the Kremlin's handpicked candidate was confirmed to have won the republic's presidential elections by a landslide. Alu Alkhanov, a 47-year-old former policeman, was shown to have captured almost 74 per cent of the vote. His election was controversial, however.

Alkhanov 's main challenger was barred from running on a technicality, he had the media and the Kremlin on his side and at least two of his rivals complained of electoral irregularities.

The British Foreign Office said yesterday it was unimpressed.

"We have serious concerns about the way these elections have been conducted," Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell said in a statement.

"In our view, another opportunity has been missed to build up the political process. Nevertheless, we hope that Mr Alkhanov and the Russian authorities will now try to advance reconciliation in Chechnya."

- INDEPENDENT