Rasul Magomedov identified his missing daughter Maryam after seeing her photo spread spread across the Internet by Russian police and security forces. Russian investigators suspect she blew herself up at the Lubyanka subway station.
“My wife and I recognized our daughter Maryam right away,” Rasul told a Novaya Gazeta reporter. “When my wife saw our daughter the last time she was wearing the same red kerchief, which is seen in the photo of her. We have not known her whereabouts for several days already.”
Magomedov said his daughter graduated with a degree in mathematics and psychology from the Dagestan Pedagogical University in 2005. After graduation, she came back home to Balahani, where she lived and taught computer science at a local school.
He also said that his daughter had no relations to insurgents in the region and had not married a local separatist leader as officials claimed.
“I would really like the investigation to uncover the true picture of what happened. We cannot even suggest how she got to Moscow. Yes, she was religious. But she has never expressed any radical beliefs,” Magomedov said.
Earlier on Friday, the Russian security service (FSB) claimed that they had identified a 17-year-old “black widow,” Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova (Abdullaeva), who was linked to the bomb attack at the Park Kultury station, the second blast that came 40 minutes after the first one at Lubyanka station at 8 a.m. local time.
A photo of Dzhennet, dressed in a black hijab arm-in-arm with her late husband and both holding pistols, has appeared on various Russian media outlets recently.
Russian authorities say her husband was killed by Russian military forces in December last year.
In Russia, female terrorists are referred to as “black widows” because many were married or are related to slain insurgent leaders.
According to the FSB, the two female suicide bombers were accompanied by two other women and one man who have been identified from subway security camera footage.
Director of the FSB Alexander Bortnikov, said on April 1 at a meeting in Makhachkala, Dagestan, in the Northern Caucasus region, that the bomb attacks in the Moscow metro had been committed by specific “bandit” groups linked to the Northern Caucasus.
Bortnikov also said that investigators knew the organizers, but so far there were no further details on the investigation.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who was also at the unscheduled visit to Makhachkala, called on police and security forces to use “tougher measures” in fighting terrorism.
“The measures to fight terrorism should be expanded, they should be more effective, harsher, crueler.”
One day later, in Dagestan’s town of Kizljar, near the Chechen border, two male suicide bombers killed 12 people, including nine policemen. One man was transporting several hundred pounds of TNT by car when he was stopped by police. A bit later, another man came to the spot where the policemen were standing and blew himself up and everyone else.
On April 4 in the same region there was another double terrorist bombings on the railway targeting transport trains. There were no fatalities, according to Russian security service.
The security forces said that the attacks, however, were connected to each other.
Responsibility Claimed
Last week in video footage aired on the Islamic Web site Caucasus Center, a speaker, who is allegedly the Northern Caucasus’s Muslim leader, Doku Umarov, claimed full responsibility for the bomb attacks in the Moscow metro on March 29.
He declared the blast was personally ordered by him and warned that attacks in Moscow “would continue.”
According to the man, the reason for the attacks was revenge for the special forces raid by Russian militias in Ingushetia in February where 20 rebels were killed along with one group leader linked to last November’s bomb attack on the Nevskiy Express train that runs between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
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