– DOUBLE AIRLINERS EXPLOSIONS

On 08/24/2004, shortly before midnight, two passenger aircrafts, one to Volgograd (former Stalingrad) and the second to Sochi, a tourist resort on the Black Sea, disappeared from the Russian radar screens almost simultaneously after they took off from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport about two hours earlier. 90 people were killed in the double crushes which occurred 5 days before the presidential election scheduled to take place in Chechnya. 

One airplane to Volgograd crashed down at 22:56 near Tulla, few hundreds km South of Moscow and the second disappeared from the screens 3 minutes later near Rostov-on-Don just North of Sochi. According to one of Sibir Airline managers, just seconds before the plane to Sochi hit the ground pilots pressed the hijack alarm button.

The investigation found traces of high explosive hexogen in the wreckage. Investigators were scraping for clues about Amanta Nagayeva, 30 and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova, 37, two Chechen Black Widows whose names were listed on tickets for the flights because they purchased tickets at the last minute and because they were the only victims about whom no relatives inquired after news of the crashes.

Amanta Nagayeva and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova, who lived in an apartment in Grozny, Chechnya’s war-shattered capital, were seen, on 08/22/2004, leaving by bus from the town of Khasavyurt in the neighboring province of Dagestan. They were accompanied by two apartment mates and co-workers – Roza Nagayeva, Amanta’s sister, and Mairam Taburova, both participated, a week later as female suicide bombers in the Beslan Horror. Amanta Nagayeva and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova arrived to Moscow by a flight from Dagestan.

A Web site connected with militant Muslims posted a statement on Friday, 08/27/2004, from the “Khalid El-Islambouli Brigades” claiming responsibility for the crashes. It warned that the group supported the Chechen rebels, and that the attack marked just the first in a series of planned operations. The claim’s veracity could not be confirmed. The same organization claimed a week later responsibility also on the Rizhskaya Bombing .

On 09/16/2004 the notorious Chechen terror leader Shamil Basayev took responsibility, in a 7 page later posted on the web, for the Double  Airliner Explosions and the Beslan Horror together.

Epilogue ; 

Captain Mikhail Artamonov, who was arrested on 09/22/2004, was accused that after he was warned by a junior policeman about two suspicious women, eventually female suicide bombers, he confiscated their tickets and sold them for his own benefit in the black market and released the women without reporting to his superiors. Captain Mikhail Artamonov warned the cashiers in Domodedovo Airport not to sell tickets to these two women.

Nevertheless these women perpetrators managed to buy two other tickets by bribing airport officials. A ticket seller, Armen Arutyunov, was arrested on 24/09/2004 for accepting 1000 rubles bribe, from which he gave 200 to an airline employee Nikolai Kornakov, who was arrested too, in order to facilitate their boarding on the planes and not to check Amanta Nagayeva and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova luggages. The two officials most likely assumed that the two Chechen women were smuggling drugs rather then explosives.

Summary ; 

It was Russian corruption that enabled the Double  Airliner Explosions and, eventually, the Beslan Horror.   

 

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