Russia Says Suicide Bomber Was Militant’s Widow -Clifford Levy & Ellen Barry
Baby-faced, she looks barely a teenager. But the pistol she is holding in the photograph suggests the violent destiny that she would choose: blowing herself up in a subway station in Moscow during the morning rush on Monday.
[A]s the photograph circulated widely, the couple turned into an unsettling symbol of Islamic militancy in Russia — deeply repugnant to most people but also likely to be embraced by other extremists as a propaganda coup, a kind of Bonnie and Clyde of the insurgency.
The story of the woman, Dzhanet Abdullayeva, from Dagestan, a volatile, predominantly Muslim region of southern Russia, near Chechnya, speaks to the challenges facing the Kremlin.
Ms. Abdullayeva — whose first name means “paradise” in her local language — was one of two female suicide bombers who attacked the Moscow subway system, killing 40 people and wounding scores.
Ms. Abdullayeva’s life ended at 8:40 a.m. Monday at the Park Kultury subway station. Riding in a train, Sim Eih Xing, a medical student from Malaysia, said he noticed a strange-looking woman near the door “in a very abnormal posture.”
“But I didn’t think she was a suicide bomber. I thought that she might be just mentally ill. So I stood behind her.”
He got off at Park Kultury and was a few feet away from the woman when the bomb detonated. Sparks appeared before his eyes and the station went silent. When he came to, he saw bodies in piles on the floor of the train. One of them was Ms. Abdullayeva’s.
[New York Times]
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