Russia says Moscow bomber was teenage “Black Widow”
The 17-year-old widow of an Islamist militant from the North Caucasus is suspected of blowing herself up in suicide attacks that killed 40 people in Moscow, Russian law enforcement officials said on Friday.
More than 50 people were killed and another 100 injured in suicide bombings this week in the Moscow metro and in a town in the turbulent North Caucasus region of Dagestan, raising fears of a new bombing campaign against the Russian heartland.
Photographs of a young woman, obtained by Reuters from a law-enforcement official in Dagestan, showed her dressed in a black hijab and holding a grenade.
Another photograph showed the woman holding a pistol. The same photograph was published in the Kommersant newspaper on Friday.
The source, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, named her as Dagestani-born Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, the widow of 30-year-old Umalat Magomedov, a prominent insurgent killed by Russian forces on December 31.
Abdurakhmanova also used the name of Dzhanet Abdullayeva, the source said.
Magomedov, who was shown in the photographs holding a pistol, styled himself as the “Emir of the mujahideen of the Vilayat Dagestan,” a local Islamist group, the source said.
The Russian Prosecutor-General’s main investigations unit later identified the same woman as the bomber.
“A native of Dagestan, Dzhanet Abdullayeva, born in 1992, detonated explosives at the Park Kultury metro station,” it said in a statement, giving no further details.
Officials said two female suicide bombers — known in the Russian media as “Black Widows” — killed at least 40 people on packed Moscow metro trains during the rush hour on Monday.