Russian investigators confirm that 28-year-old teacher was 2nd subway suicide bomber

Russia says teacher was 2nd subway suicide bomber

MOSCOW — Investigators confirmed Tuesday that one of the two suicide bombings on Moscow’s subway last week was carried out by a 28-year-old teacher from the North Caucasus, whose father recognized a photograph of her severed head.

“I did recognize my daughter in the picture,” Maryam Sharipova’s father, Rasul Magomedov, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The two March 29 bombings, which killed 40 people and wounded 121 during the morning rush hour, were the first suicide attacks in the capital in six years. They served as a stark reminder of the Islamic insurgency raging in predominantly Muslim provinces of the North Caucasus, including Dagestan, where both female suicide bombers were from.

The Federal Security Service said evidence showed that Sharipova, a university-educated computer science teacher, was one of the bombers. The other had been identified earlier as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, the 17-year-old widow of an Islamic militant slain by government forces.

The security service said Sharipova was believed to have been the wife of an Islamic militant.

Her father said local security officers told him that several weeks ago, but he had believed his daughter when she said she would never marry without his consent.

“It’s absolute nonsense,” Magomedov said, speaking by telephone from Dagestan. “She was always at school or at home. If there is a husband, his wife should be with him.”

Sharipova, an only daughter, taught at the same school as her parents and lived with them in their home village, Balakhani. Her father described her as “patient and well educated.”

He said she was religious but never expressed any radical beliefs or gave any indication she was involved with militants.

“I don’t believe what has happened. It’s too hard,” Magomedov said. “She never believed in sects, and I don’t, and our village has been Muslim for ages. We never had any apostates, and even in Soviet times there was a working mosque.”

A Chechen militant leader, Doku Umarov, claimed responsibility for the Moscow attacks, which he said were retaliation for the killing of civilians by security forces.

Umarov, a veteran of the two separatist wars in Chechnya, is now seeking to create an Islamic state across the region.

Human rights groups accuse security forces and police in the North Caucasus of fueling the insurgency through extrajudicial killings, abductions and abuses.

Female suicide bombers from the North Caucasus are often called “black widows” in Russia because many of them are the wives, or other relatives, of militants killed by security forces. Some women go believing they will be reunited with their loved ones beyond the grave, but others are sent against their will, according to experts on the North Caucasus insurgency.

Sharipova’s father said she left home on the afternoon of March 28 to visit a girlfriend and never returned. The next morning, Sharipova died in Moscow more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away. She was still wearing the same red scarf around her neck.

A Malaysian medical student in Moscow who saw Abdurakhmanova, the teenage bomber, described her as having glassy eyes, as if she were on drugs. Sim Eih Xing said he thought she was mentally ill so he moved away from her in the subway car.

“Her eyes were very open, like on drugs, and she barely blinked, and it was scary,” Sim, 23, told The Moscow Times. He escaped the blast with cuts to his leg and singed hair.

Investigators have released few details about the suicide attacks

Sergei Markedonov of the Moscow-based Institute for Political and Military Analysis, who studies the North Caucasus, said the female suicide bombers are more often driven by personal revenge for slain relatives than by promises of martyrdom and reward in the afterlife.

Militants in the North Caucasus are less driven by ideology than jihadists in the Middle East, he said.