TERROR PROBE FOCUSES ON 2 CHECHEN WOMEN

August 31, 2004 - (Combined News Services) They lived in the same apartment in Chechnya, worked in the same market and may have died within moments of each other on separate airliners that crashed in Russia last week.

As new details emerged yesterday about the two Chechen women who are the focus of suspicion that the planes were blown up by terrorists, the Russian-backed Alu Alkhanov was declared the landslide winner of Sunday's election for the Chechen presidency. Officials had warned that insurgents might commit terrorist acts to try to undermine the vote.

The opposition charged yesterday that the voting was tainted by fraud after Chechen elections commission head Abdul-Kerim Arsakhanov said Alkhanov had received nearly 74 percent of the vote. Arsakhanov said voter turnout was about 85 percent, even though many polling stations appeared sparsely attended.
Candidate Abdullah Buga- yev said he had formally complained about violations, including an Alkhanov campaign worker who ordered people to vote for him at a polling station. A representative of another candidate, Movsur Khamidov, said he found ballot boxes stuffed shortly after a polling station opened.
In Washington, the State Department said the election was seriously flawed and did not meet international standards.

Gen. Andrei Fetisov of the Federal Security Service reiterated that investigators are certain there were explosions and traces of the explosive hexogen in both crashes, which killed 90 people. Officials citing a "black box" recording from one plane said there was no evidence of a hijacking attempt or any other disturbance.

Investigators were looking for clues about Amanta Nagayeva, 30, and S. Dzhebirkhanova, 37, Chechens whose names were listed on tickets for the flights. Their bodies have not been identified and officials were considering two scenarios: They were suicide bombers or their passports were used by other women.

Nagayeva and Dzhebirkhanova, who lived in an apartment in Grozny, Chechnya's war- shattered capital, were seen Aug. 22 taking a bus from Khasavyurt in neighboring Dagestan province, the newspaper said. They were believed to be en route to Baku, Azerbaijan, where they often bought things to sell at the Grozny market. Their destination on the bus was not known, the newspaper Izvestia said, but they were accompanied by two apartment mates and co-workers - Rosa Nagayeva, Amanta's sister, and Mariyam Taburova.

Nagayeva was single and Dzhebirkhanova divorced. Nagayeva had a brother who disappeared three years ago in Chechnya; the family believes he was abducted by Russian forces. Dzhebirkhanova's brother, an Islamic court judge under Chechen separatist president Aslan Maskhadov, was killed in 1998.

An unidentified Chechen Interior Ministry official was quoted as telling Izvestia that both women were "clean" of demonstrable rebel ties. Their families did not report them missing after the crashes and said later they were unaware the women were engaged in any rebel or terrorist activity, Izvestia reported.
Nagayeva's mother said her daughter had never flown.

Investigators said if the pair were terrorists and had traveled from Grozny to Moscow, Taburova and Nagayeva's sister also could be suspects.

Several suicide bombings in recent years have been blamed on Chechen women who lost husbands or brothers in the war and chaos that have plagued the southern republic for most of the past decade. Rebels find women with "private life problems," Moscow criminologist and professor Yuri Antonyan told Newsday. Muslims, particularly the fanatical fringe, "see self-sacrifice as their duty, as the solution" to all their problems, he added.

Rebels "don't have either aircrafts or tanks," he said. "They're their own bombers."

Special correspondent Lena Vozdvizhenskaya contributed to this story from Moscow.

From: http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wochec313948885aug31,0,4280645.story?coll=ny-top-headlines