MOSCOW, (AFP) - She was a 17-year-old girl from a village deep in the North Caucasus with a baby face and a name meaning paradise.
But in the early morning of March 29, 2010, Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova strapped several kilogrammes of explosives to her body and headed into the bustling Moscow metro with a female companion.
She then detonated her explosives at the Park Kultury metro station, killing over 20 people, part of the double suicide bombing that claimed a total of 40 lives.
Later, investigators would find her severed head, smeared in blood, on the metro platform.
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| Undated and unlocated photo provided on Friday by Newsteam shows 17 year-old suicide bomber Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova posing with a gun. |
Like other Muslim Russian women who carried out suicide bombings earlier in the decade, Abdurakhmanova was a "Black Widow", the wife of a leading Caucasus militant killed in a special operation by the Russian security forces.
Russia's National Anti-Terror Committee and the investigative committee of prosecutors confirmed that Abdurakhmanova had carried out the Park Kultury bombing.
Photographs published Friday showed Abdurakhmanova, a baby-faced teenager, posing in an Islamic headscarf with her late husband Umalat Magomedov, who bore the nom-de-guerre of "Al-Bara".
But it is no normal picture of a young husband and wife. For Abdurakhmanova is proudly pointing a small pistol to the sky and her husband is gripping a larger weapon.
In another image, Abdurakhmanova wears the Islamic niqab headscarf that shows only her eyes through a slit and proudly clutches a grenade in her hand.
Magomedov was a Dagestani rebel killed in an operation on December 31 last year and was suspected of being close to top Islamist rebel Doku Umarov, who claimed he ordered the Moscow attacks.
The Kommersant daily said that Abdurakhmanova was from the village of Kostek in western Dagestan, known for producing wrestling champions.
It said she met Magomedov when she was 16 after making contact through the Internet and subsequently they became inseparable.
It was unclear whether the couple were formally married. Magomedov does not wear a ring in the photographs. Kommersant said that Abdurakhmanova may also have another surname, Abdulayeva.
Her name Dzhennet, found among Muslim women in Russia, is derived from the Arabic word Jannat, meaning paradise.
The reports said she had been identified as the bomber after officials compared the photograph with the severed head found at the metro station.
Investigators have not officially identified the second bomber, but one version is that she was a Chechen woman called Markha Ustarkhanova who was also married to a Caucasus militant, Kommersant reported.
Ustarkhanova, 20, is the widow of a rebel from the Chechen town of Gudermes, Said-Emin Khizriyev, Kommersant reported.
However, a Chechen security force source told the RIA Novosti news agency Thursday that investigators concluded that a photograph of Ustarkhanova did not match either bomber.
The two women who staged the bombings are believed to have taken an intercity bus to Moscow from the Dagestan town of Kizlyar, where a double suicide bombing killed 12 on Wednesday.
Kizlyar is just over the regional border from Chechnya and has good train and bus connections to the Russian capital. Reports have said the women were trained in a camp for suicide bombers in Chechnya.
The Interfax news agency quoted a source close to the investigation as saying that male accomplices had rented a flat in central Moscow where the explosive materials were kept.
It said that after being put together, the suicide belts were handed over to the two women close to Vorobyovye Gori metro station in southwest Moscow where they descended into the underground system to wreak carnage.
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