Chechen Women Being Seized to Preempt Bombings, Rights Groups Say

KATYR YURT, Russia —  The pattern is chilling in its simplicity. First, the husband dies. Often, he’s a Chechen rebel fighter, or someone merely suspected of being a rebel. He is killed in a firefight with Russian forces, or he is arrested and dies in custody.

Then, the woman who mourns him disappears. Sometimes she is released after a few days or a few weeks. Or sometimes not at all.

In what human rights groups say is a new strategy of preemptive strikes, Russian security services have launched a series of raids targeting young Chechen women seen as potential “black widow” suicide bombers. Such bombers, having lost a husband, father or brother, leave quiet farm villages like this one, board the slow overnight train to Moscow, strap bomb packs known as “martyr belts” to their waists and transform their despair into horrific explosions.

In the last few months, dozens of women in Chechnya have been grabbed from their homes by men in masks and camouflage gear and taken away to prison or unknown fates. Many have no apparent connections to terrorist groups, investigators say, except that they recently lost relatives to the 10-year-old conflict in the mountainous breakaway republic.

Three of the women have been missing for as long as four months, according to the Moscow-based human rights organization Memorial.

“The practice is that if someone is detained and is ever found again, that happens in the first two or three days. If it’s a week, or even a month, the rule is that people don’t ever show up,” said a human rights worker who has investigated the disappearances in the Chechen capital, Grozny. He declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.

“Our opinion is that someone must have thought that these women were getting ready to become suicide bombers. And there must have been some sort of official order to detain them before that could happen,” he said.

Female suicide bombers have been responsible for at least a dozen fatal bombings directed at Russian targets since 2000, killing more than 200 people. Last week, a 21-year-old Chechen woman, Zara Murtazaliyeva, was charged with terrorism and illegal storage of explosives after being arrested outside a Moscow hotel belonging to the Russian Interior Ministry. A search revealed that she possessed 7 ounces of plastic explosives.

The Federal Security Service in Achkoi-Martan, the district where many of the detentions have occurred, declined to discuss its security policies. Families of the missing have often been unable to learn what agency made the arrests or where the women were being held.

Russian officials, who almost never discuss arrests made in Chechnya, say they have found evidence many women who “disappear” from their homes end up at terrorist training facilities for women run by Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, or at safe houses in Moscow where they prepare for terrorist attacks.

But human rights groups have documented that the majority of recent cases of missing women involved those who were abducted from their homes by masked men in camouflage gear, usually not bearing the marks of any particular military or police unit. For years in Chechnya, this has meant either Russian military forces or Chechen security forces loyal to Moscow.

Some women who have been detained have no apparent connection to black widow investigations. In some cases, their captors have used threats against them to pressure male relatives into revealing information during interrogations.

“The treatment of women is becoming harsher. They’re not only being intimidated, blackmailed and threatened, in some cases they are being beaten,” said Lipkhan Bazayeva, a human rights worker in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia.

Elza Gaytamirova’s husband, Rumid-Babek Isayev, disappeared in 2001. Since then, Gaytamirova, a 31-year-old mother of four, has been arrested four times. Neighbors said she told them that she had been hung by her ankles and interrogated in December. On Jan. 15, men in masks pulled up in front of her house in the town of Gekhi, grabbed Gaytamirova and disappeared. She has not been heard from since.

On the outskirts of Grozny, unidentified armed men on Jan. 4 arrived at the home of 59-year-old Petimat Gambulatova and drove away with her, her three daughters and 27-year-old son. Gambulatov and her three daughters were released three months later but her son is still missing. The abduction happened a month after a close relative, Akhmad Musayev, went missing.

Gambulatova and her daughters have refused to discuss their abduction with human rights investigators. But from the information available, investigators believe that they were being held by Chechen forces cooperating with the Russian military.

And in the western Chechen town of Assinovskaya, more than 20 Russian secret service officers in January arrested Luiza Mutayeva, whose sister, Malizha, allegedly took part in a Chechen hostage-taking operation at a Moscow theater in 2002. Mutayeva was loaded into a minibus with no license plates and taken in an unknown direction. She has been missing since.

Lyubov Dubas, an accountant, said her daughter, Milana Ozdoyeva, was arrested Jan. 19. “I kept talking to them, trying to talk them into letting her go, or taking me with her, or taking me instead,” Dubas said.

Dubas said her daughter’s husband, who had connections to Chechen rebels, was killed last year. Ozdoyeva was caring for her infant son and 3-year-old daughter when Russian security officials came to talk to her, saying they had information that she was being recruited as a black widow.

“When we heard this, we smiled. She’s with her children. She’s 21 years old. What kind of a suicide bomber would she be?” Dubas said. “She herself told them, I don’t want to be a martyr. I want to live.”

The next day, and for many days after, Dubas went to the police, the Federal Security Service and the prosecutor, asking for information.

“They said there were no raids overnight, we didn’t take your daughter, we don’t even know what you’re talking about,” she said. “All of them in unison: They don’t know what happened.”

Dubas brushed away tears and pulled her granddaughter close. “I lost the habit of taking care of little children, but life made me remember all these skills,” she said. “She’s turned 3 now. She can tell you the story about her mother being led away by Russians. She believes Allah will help us, and bring her mother back.”