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.
