http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/world/europe/30blackwidows.html?ref=global-home
Blasts Revive Russians' Fear of Female Bombers By ANDREW E. KRAMER Published: March 29, 2010 MOSCOW - The two powerful explosions that tore through Moscow's subway Monday revived a peculiar fear in the Russian capital, one that goes beyond the usual terrorism worries of a metropolis: the female bomber. On Monday, the Russian authorities said 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 adorned 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. They joined in some of the most celebrated 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 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. Females 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 walked among into slumped forms and 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 internal flights; one bomber identified by the Russian authorities was divorced in her early 40s, the other two sisters in their 20s who had also divorced. While there is no single reason women decide to give up their lives, experts say they have usually suffered a traumatic event that makes them burn with revenge or question whether they want to live. This can 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, Russian police captured 22-year-old Chechen woman, Zarema M. Muzhakhoyeva, after she left a handbag bomb in a Moscow café. 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. 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. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
