Sisters in arms

What drove two Chechen sisters to become suicide bombers? A year after Rosa Nagayeva was blown up in the Beslan school siege, and Amnat brought down a plane over Russia, Nick Paton Walsh looks for clues in Grozny
As dusk fell on the first day of the Beslan school siege, the head of the terrorists began rowing with the two masked female suicide bombers in his group. One of them had, according to one witness, refused to shoot a boy hostage. Ruslan Khuchbarov, who had a remote trigger for their explosive belts, shoved them into a corner and blew them both up.

A week earlier, a woman now known as Passenger 28 boarded flight 1303 from Moscow to Volgograd. Forty-one minutes into the flight, she detonated a device that brought down the plane and its 43 passengers near the town of Tula, 200km south of Moscow.

The plane blasts and the Beslan tragedy, which began a year ago today, betrayed the ruthlessness of Chechen extremism. Ninety-eight died in two simultaneous blasts on airliners leaving Moscow; 331 hostages perished in Beslan. But the two attacks were linked by more than ideology and a desire to terrify. According to Russian prosecutor, DNA tests identify one Beslan suicide bomber and Passenger 28 as sisters from Chechnya: Rosa Nagayeva, 28, and Amnat Nagayeva, 30.

Why Amnat and Rosa decided to sacrifice their lives to kill 420 schoolchildren, parents and air passengers is a secret they have taken to the grave. But its roots must lie in the southern highlands of Chechnya where they grew up, and the ruins of Grozny where they worked together as market traders.

Sitting in a cafe in the Chechen capital, their youngest brother Islam, 23, and older sister, Asma, 43, refuse to accept not only that their sisters carried out Russia's worst series of terrorist attacks, but even that they are dead.

"They are still alive," Islam insists. Asma adds: "I lived with them and knew them. I would have suspected something or they would have shown some motivation to do that." The pair maintain that their sisters left Grozny for Baku in Azerbaijan on August 22 last year, a few days before the planes blew up, intending to stock up on the schoolbooks, satchels and uniforms they sold in Grozny's market. Asked why they have not seen Rosa and Amnat since, they speculate that they may have been detained by Azeri customs officials on the border. "One local prosecutor told us their passports were probably stolen and used by someone else," says Asma.

Rosa and Amnat were born in the southern Chechen village of Tevzani. Today, it is one of the most dangerous places in Chechnya; in the mid-70s, it was calm and beautiful. Yet the village's poverty led their father, Salman, to move the family to the Russian town of Rostov on Don, where they lived on the farm where he worked. "We had a house there, and those of us at home at the time slept in the same room," recalls Islam. Salman died aged 53 from a suspected heart attack, Islam said, leaving the devout Muslim Taus, 63, to tend for her 11 children.

Even in Rostov, opportunities were few. Despite learning Ukrainian, German and developing a passion for reading, Amnat left school aged 15. Rosa followed suit. "From age 17, Rosa periodically had seizures," Islam recalls. "Nobody could diagnose what it was, but we thought it was epilepsy." Rosa found some medication for the illness in Rostov, yet the treatment lapsed when they returned to Tevzani in the early 90s.

Back in Chechnya, they found their home town in the grip of the unemployment and chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. "We thought that, like Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union, Chechnya would also get its independence," Asma says.

They stayed while the republic collapsed into its first war in 1994. That bloody bid for independence led to a peace deal with the Yeltsin administration in August 1996, but only after Grozny had been carpet-bombed and an estimated 73,000 Chechens and 5,700 Russian soldiers died.

News of the capital's devastation reached them via refugees and local TV. Asma describes how the girls in the family cried when they saw "our beautiful city" in ruins. "We could see with our own eyes what was happening. Of course, anyone gets angry when they see normal people being killed."

It was during the republic's brief spell of independence, before the second war in 1999, that Amnat first showed her business prowess. "Amnat was particularly good at knowing what would sell," says Asma. With the money she earned from selling basics like pasta, cooking oil, shampoo and washing powder, Amnat would buy the family clothes. Trade went well, until raids by Shamil Basayev into neighbouring Dagestan, and a series of blasts in Moscow, sparked the second war in September 1999.

Tevzani faced massive aerial bombardment by the Russian military, killing many civilians. Yet it was not until after Russia had retaken Chechnya that the Nagayev family experienced its first loss. The brutality of the second war was surpassed by years of zachistki, or "clean-up operations", as the Russian military rounded up men with separatist connections or merely those of fighting age, interrogating them, beating them, and often executing them. Memorial, the human rights group that documents abuses on only a third of the territory of Chechnya, estimates that since the second war ended in 2000, nearly 3,000 people have been abducted. Most are thought to be dead.

"Zachistki started in Tevzani in 2000," says Asma. "They would surround the village with trucks and armoured personnel carriers. You'd look out and see men combing the streets with AK47s. They went from house to house, taking gold, money, arms. They did not touch the women but took away the men."

Among them were Zaur Dagayev, 29, and his friend, Uvais Nagayev, 32, Rosa and Amnat's brother. They were at Zaur's home on April 27 2001, when Russian troops from the 45th division stationed nearby came to the house. "They surrounded them and led them off, presumably to their barracks," says Asma.

Memorial documents that the pair were that evening led by the troops to a graveyard in Tevzani. Uvais and Zaur were forced to lie down among the gravestones, and the troops then opened fire, killing Zaur outright.

"It was dark and Uvais could not see what had happened to Zaur," says Islam. "He pretended to be dead." The following morning, Islam says, Uvais returned injured to Zaur's home. "That morning the 45th came for him again at Zaur's house," says Asma. "They bound his hands and took him away."

Memorial's records confirm its version of events, but suggest it took four days for the Russian military to return for Uvais. The Nagayevas heard nothing, and were hysterical with worry. "We searched for him everywhere - including at the 45th's barracks," says Asma.

Amnat began to despair. She knew a woman from the town of Gudermes whose husband and son had disappeared, and had paid a "mediator" - usually someone either in or connected to the security services - to find out what had happened.

"We found someone like that," says Asma. "Amnat went to him and paid him $200. He said he would look for Uvais and find him in months. He had to be with the FSB [the Russian security service] as he had connections. Who else could we trust?"

The pair says their contact came up with no information, yet Memorial's account says the mediator told them Uvais had been tortured into confessing to some unspecified crimes. Finally, his corpse had been dumped and blown up with explosives. Without the body, however, Islam and Asma remain hopeful. "Sometimes people end up in jail in Siberia under a different name," says Islam.

Tevzani's ordeal did not end there, the zachistki and some aerial bombardment continuing in 2002, causing residents to flee. That year Amnat and Rosa moved back to Grozny to resume their trading.

"They got a flat near the market," says Asma. It was then that their fate took shape. "I went to see them occasionally," says Asma. "All they did was work, and when they came home they ate, washed, slept and sometimes watched TV."

Trade was going well. Working near them at another market stall were Miriam Taburova, 27, and Satsita Dzherbikhanova, 37. The four became friends and moved in together, sharing the $30-a-month rent. The windows were glassless and covered with plastic film, and they slept on two beds that were little more than blankets stacked on top of boxes.

In August last year, they were gearing up for their busiest time of the year, the return to school. Another purchasing trip to Baku beckoned, Asma says. The four left together, and, it appears, died together. Dzherbikhanova boarded a plane to Sochi moments before Amnat took her seat on flight 1303, detonating a device that caused her plane, bound for the southern resort of Sochi, to fall off the radar and crash near Rostov on Don three minutes after 1303 crashed. Taburova died in Beslan, blown up alongside Rosa on the evening of the first day. While some witnesses recall how the two masked women in Beslan showed some compassion, another recalled how one of them threatened to shoot the three people sitting next to anyone caught using a mobile phone.

What drove Amnat and Rosa to become suicide bombers? Militants talk of "black widows" - women broken by the loss of a husband or brother, and seeking revenge. The Russian FSB paints a less idealistic picture. It suggests such women are recruited by criminal gangs who promise to forgive a family debt in exchange for their services. One prosecutor has suggested women are sometimes raped on video. The tape is then used to ensure the woman is ostracised from Chechen society, then shamed into taking her own life.

As for Islam and Asma, they will not even entertain the possibility that their sisters were capable of suicide, let alone murder.