Chechen neighbours suspected of being airliner bombers

They lived in the same apartment in Chechnya, worked in the same market and possibly died within moments of each other on separate airliners that crashed in Russia last week.

New details emerged today about the two Chechen women who are the focus of suspicions that the planes were blown up by terrorists, but questions also arose.

Russian investigators continued piecing together information about the Tuesday crashes that killed a total of 90 people.

General Andrei Fetisov, chief of the scientific department at the Federal Security Service, said investigators are certain there were explosions on both planes and reiterated that traces of the high explosive hexogen were found in the wreckage.

How the explosive may have been brought on board the planes that took off from Moscow is still unclear, and investigators were scraping for clues about Amanta Nagayeva and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova, two Chechen women whose names were listed on tickets for the flights.

The crashes took place just five days before presidential elections in Chechnya, where separatist rebels have been fighting Russian forces for five years, and officials had warned that insurgents and their supporters could commit terrorist acts to try to undermine the vote.

Nagayeva, 30, and the 37-year-old Dzhebirkhanova aroused accident investigators’ suspicion because they purchased tickets at the last minute and were the only victims relatives had not inquired about after news of the crashes.

But Nagayeva’s and Dzhebirkhanova’s bodies have not yet been identified.

Officials were considering two scenarios, in which either Nagayeva and Dzhebirkhanova were indeed suicide bombers or their passports had been used by other women, said Chechen law enforcement officials.

Nagayeva and Dzhebirkhanova, who lived in an apartment in Grozny, Chechnya’s war-shattered capital, were seen on August 22 leaving by bus from the town of Khasavyurt in the neighbouring province of Dagestan, reported the newspaper Izvestia.

They were believed to be en route to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where they often bought clothes and other commodities to sell at the market in Grozny.

The women’s destination on the bus was not known. They were accompanied by two apartment-mates and co-workers: Rosa Nagayeva, Amanta’s sister, and Mariyam Taburova, Izvestia said.

Nagayeva was single, while Dzhebirkhanova had been divorced. Nagayeva’s brother disappeared three years ago in Chechnya the family believes he was abducted by Russian forces.

A brother of Dzhebirkhanova, who had been an Islamic court judge under Chechen separatist president Aslan Maskhadov, was killed in 1998.

A Chechen Interior Ministry official told Izvestia that both Nagayeva and Dzhebirkhanova were ”clean” of demonstrable rebel ties.

Neither Nagayeva’s nor Dzhebirkhanova’s relatives were aware of the two women engaging in any activity connected to rebels or terrorists, Izvestia reported. Nagayeva’s mother said her daughter had never flown.

According to the investigators, if the two women were in fact terrorists and had travelled from Grozny to Moscow, Taburova and Nagayeva’s sister also could be suspects and be in the capital, Izvestia said.

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.