Russia’s Fear of Female Bombers Is Revived
Published: March 29, 2010
MOSCOW — The two powerful explosions that tore through Moscow’s subway on Monday revived a peculiar fear in the Russian capital, one that goes beyond the usual terrorism worries of a metropolis: the female bomber.
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Times Topic: Russia
On Monday, the Russian authorities said that the bombings had been carried out by two women, and that they were searching for two suspected female accomplices, the Russian news media reported. Few details of the bombers were released.
Earlier this decade, Moscow’s fear of female suicide bombers was so strong it became a lurid obsession. Women, sometimes casually clad in jeans and blending in to the swirl of Moscow, committed at least 16 bombings, including two on board planes.
The attacks came early — as when a widow killed herself and the Russian commander who had killed her husband in one of the first such attacks in the Chechen war — and sometimes in the most unlikely places, like mingling in line at a music festival, which only multiplied the horror. Women joined in some of the most well-known terrorist attacks in recent Russian history, at a theater in Moscow and a school in Beslan, Russia.
The women, who came to be called the Black Widows, were not the first women to die this way. That dubious honor goes to a 16-year-old Palestinian girl, who drove a truck into an Israeli Army convoy in 1985. The former Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was killed in 1991 by a member of the Birds of Paradise, a female group associated with the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.
Suicide bombing was a tactic that came late to Chechnya and was nearly unknown during the first war from 1994 to 1996. But once it arrived, in 2000, in an attack that killed 27 Russian special forces soldiers, it quickly became associated with women.
The tactic expanded in subsequent years. Women adorned in billowy black robes and strapped with explosives made up 19 of the 41 captors in the October 2002 hostage taking in the Moscow theater, which ended when Russian special services released a sleep-inducing gas into the building.
When soldiers entered the auditorium they reportedly, as a first precaution, shot dead the Black Widows where they lay, lest they wake up and explode.
In 2004, female suicide bombers detonated bombs on domestic flights; one bomber identified by the Russian authorities was in her early 40s, and two others were sisters in their 20s.
While there is no single reason that women decide to give up their lives, experts said they have usually suffered a traumatic event that makes them burn with revenge or question whether they want to live. In the case of the attacks in Russia, this could be the death of a child, husband or other family member at the hands of Russian forces, or a rape. Russian authorities have said the women are sometimes drugged.
In 2003, the Russian police captured a 22-year-old Chechen woman, Zarema M. Muzhakhoyeva, after she left a handbag bomb in a Moscow cafe. She was not a religious fanatic, her lawyer, Natalya V. Yevlapova, said in a telephone interview, but she had become emotionally distressed after her husband was murdered in what appeared to be a business dispute.
“These girls are just pushed into a corner,” Ms. Yevlapova said.
A rare window on the world of female suicide bombing appeared when Russian police captured Ms. Muzhakhoyeva. She later said she intentionally bungled the attack because she had lost the will to die.
A Federal Security Service bomb squad member died defusing her explosive-laden bag.
She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
In recent weeks, the Russian military conducted a series of raids that killed a prominent and charismatic recruiter for the rebels, a man who went by the name Said Buryatsky, along with dozens of other fighters. That had prompted a warning from a prominent rebel leader, who may or may not have made good his threat on Monday.