THE SUNDAY TIMES: Videos made by the widows who became suicide bombers on the Moscow metro give a chilling insight into the radicalisation of women
Sitting on a carpet beside an AK-47 automatic rifle, her face concealed behind a black veil, Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova calmly addresses the shaky video camera. Her message is chilling.
In a soft voice, broken only once by a heavy sigh, the 17-year-old tells how she has sealed a pact with Allah in return for a place in heaven. “I have decided to fulfil my pledge,” she says. “God willing, I will become a martyr.”
Four days later Abdurakhmanova caught an early-morning train on the Moscow metro, more than 1,000 miles from her native Dagestan in Russia’s Caucasus region.
Strapped to her waist was more than 4lb of explosive packed with metal bolts and screws. At a station in central Moscow she detonated the charge. The blast killed 14 commuters and wounded dozens more. She was decapitated.
A second video, shot in the same place, shows another veiled woman who was identified by the security sources as Maryam Sharipova.
On the day that Abdurakhmanova set off her bomb in March, Sharipova, a 28-year-old teacher from Dagestan, killed 26 people by blowing herself up at Moscow’s Lubyanka metro station. More than 100 were injured in the two explosions, the first such attack in the capital for six years.
The videos, obtained by The Sunday Times, provide fresh insights into the indoctrinated minds of the two bombers. Both repeatedly call on other women to turn themselves into human bombs. Read on and comment (+ chilling video) >>> Mark Franchetti | Sunday, June 20, 2010
