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| Emergency workers search at the crash site of Russian Tu-134 near the village of Buchalki in the Tula region, Wednesday, in this Aug. 25, 2004 file photo. (File Photo/Reuters) |
MOSCOW (AP) - Russian authorities believe that two Chechen
women suspected of blowing up Russian passenger jets last month got on the
planes by paying bribes, media reports said.
Both were detained and handed over to a police officer, who let them go,
the Interfax news agency quoted Russia's Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov
as saying. The women had arrived at the airport the evening of Aug. 24,
accompanied by two other Chechens, Ustinov told Interfax.
``Police officers spotted them, confiscated their passports and handed them
over to a police captain responsible for anti-terrorism operations to examine
their belongings,'' he was quoted as saying in the Wednesday report. ``The
captain let them go without any check, and they started to try to obtain
tickets in the same buildings.''
It is not unusual for Chechens to be stopped by police in Moscow for questioning.
One of the alleged suicide bombers used an intermediary to pay $34 to a Sibir
airlines employee to board a jet, even though she had a ticket for a flight
the next day, Interfax quoted Ustinov as saying. She got on the plane two
minutes before check-in closed, he said.
The same intermediary also took a bribe from the other alleged suicide bomber
to get on a Volga-Aviaexpress flight, he said.
Ustinov said both the intermediary and the Sibir airline employee have been
arrested.
The two planes crashed almost simultaneously on the night of Aug. 24 after
taking off from Moscow's Domodyedovo airport, killing 90 people.
Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said laboratory tests of the wreckage
of the Sibir Tu-154 and the Volga-Aviaexpress Tu-134 confirmed the explosions
that brought down the two planes both occurred in passenger cabins, reinforcing
the suspicion that the two Chechen women were suicide bombers.
He said explosive residue and information from the planes' flight data recorders
pointed to an explosion in the main cabin.
One of the women had purchased a ticket for a flight scheduled the next day
but - after paying the bribe - got on the earlier flight two minutes before
check-in closed, Ustinov said.
The crashes were the first in a series of recent attacks that have killed
more than 430 people. On Aug. 31, a suicide bomber detonated explosives at
a Moscow subway station, killing 10. The next day, dozens of heavily armed
militants took more than 1,200 hostages at a school in southern Russia, which
led to the deaths of more than 330 people, many of them children.
Female suicide bombers have become increasingly common in Russia, where they
are known as ``black widows'' - women who turn to violence after losing husbands
or male relatives in Chechen fighting.
Russia's Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported Wednesday that Russian security services
have been searching for about 20 women allegedly recently trained by extremist
Islamist underground cells to commit suicide terrorist attacks.
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