MOSCOW — Russian authorities said Friday that one of the two suicide bombers who struck the Moscow subway system this week was the 17-year- old widow of an Islamist rebel leader, and officials circulated unsettling photos of the cherub-faced teenager brandishing a handgun and a grenade.
Citing genetic evidence, law enforcement agencies said the young woman, Dzhanet Abdullayeva, set off the second of the two explosions that killed 40 people and injured more than 80 others during morning rush hour Monday.
Officials said she grew up about 40 miles from the site of another double bombing Wednesday in Dagestan, east of Chechnya in the volatile North Caucasus. Authorities have said the attack, which killed 12 people, most of them police officers, might have been organized by the same group that planned the Moscow bombings.
Abdullayeva’s hometown, Khasavyurt, was the scene of a New Year’s Eve shootout between insurgents and security forces that killed her husband, Umulat Magomedov, 30, a leader in the insurgency, which seeks to set up an Islamist emirate in the region.
The Russian daily Kommersant also said investigators had tentatively identified the other suicide bomber in Moscow as the 20-year-old widow of a militant leader who was killed in October while preparing to assassinate the Kremlin’s governor in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
