Assault on the Domodedovo airport
The kamikaze terrorist was a man

MOSCOW – The kamikaze who yesterday blew himself up at the Domodedovo airport in Moscow, where 35 people lost their lives yesterday and 168 were injured. Russian investigators are now convinced, a spokesman told the Itar Tass that “the terrorist was between 30 and 40 years old, he was strong and had a European appearance”. The Russian website Life News, judged reliable, published the photo, which presents as an exclusive, the head of the alleged kamikaze, the only part of his body that would have remained intact. The same site also shows a movie with the reconstruction of the explosion. The bomb, an investigative source told the Interfax agency, was linked to the man’s body, which would have been alone. “The remains of one man, who allegedly committed the terrorist attack, were found on the scene,” the source said. “The nature of the injuries suffered by the terrorist show that the explosive device was linked to his body,” he added.

The news contradicts what was initially suspected. The Russian press had in fact spoken of a kamikaze woman, remembering the last year, and returning to the ‘black widows’ of the North Caucasus, women who lost their husbands, were killed in action, and who voluntarily made themselves available to the Islamic separatist guerrillas as aspiring suicide bombers to avenge their death. According to a police source quoted by the Ria-Novosti agency, the kamikaze woman was accompanied by an accomplice, perhaps a ‘fighter’ of Arab origin. Both died in the explosion. According to some information, the two bombers were taken to the airport by a third accomplice who then waited in a car parked in front of the airport. Now the news has been denied.

The same thesis was supported by the Kommersant. According to the Russian newspaper the bomber would have been part of a commando arrived from the Northern Caucasus. In all likelihood from Chechnya. The investigators have no doubt indeed on the Caucasian matrix of the terrorist action: “The modalities are the traditional ones of the terrorists coming from the North Caucasus”, that is from rebel Muslim republics like Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, said the official who asked to stay anonymous. For now, however, there has been no claim, and the Kavkazcentr site, traditionally a spokesman for the positions of Caucasian Islamic rebels, reported this morning only the news of yesterday’s events in Domodedovo, mocking the alleged “track followed for days by Russian security forces” , which would have been on the trail, in vain, of three suspects.

The Kommersant also claimed that the Russian secret services had been warned of the danger of a larger-scale bomb attack after the complete destruction of a small building located within a sports club and blown up on the evening of December 31st. The explosion, according to the newspaper’s anonymous sources, was allegedly caused by another Caucasian woman who accidentally triggered the charge she was carrying because of her inexperience. “The guerrilla leaders had sent women to carry out an attack on the night of the last year, but one of them made its explosive explode prematurely”, is the reconstruction.

On the other hand, the suicide bomber of December 31 would have been accompanied by an accomplice, who managed to escape: it would be the wife of an extremist who is serving a prison sentence for the crime of participation in an armed band. She herself was later captured in Volgograd, in southern Russia, where she had taken refuge. The Moscow authorities meanwhile would have hunted down three more Chechens, suspected of preparing a new suicide attack: the trio would have accompanied the suicide bomber that blew up yesterday in Domodedovo. Once the mission was accomplished, the three would disappear without a trace.

(January 25, 2011)