RUSSIA: Moscow suffered a second shocking blow from a new kind of Chechen weapon this weekend - the women known as "black widows".
When Muscovites heard that two women had blown themselves up at a rock concert on Saturday, killing 15 people, thoughts rapidly returned to the pictures which transfixed the nation last October, when Chechen rebels seized the Dubrovka theatre for three days. The footage showed women sitting among the 800 hostages, their faces veiled by headscarves, with explosives strapped to their waists and clutching remote-control triggers.
When special forces ended the siege, the women's bodies were shown slumped in their seats, their explosives intact.
Chechnya's women had begun fighting for independence alongside men and Russians faced a new and terrifying threat to their security. The threat returned to Moscow this weekend.
Russians are now wondering how security forces can stop a flow of women ready to die for their cause and who are already blamed for killing almost 100 people in suicide attacks in Chechnya over the last three months.
Officials say the phenomenon proves the growing influence of foreign Islamic extremist groups on Chechnya's separatist rebels. Many Chechens say the women are usually widows of rebels or of men allegedly tortured and murdered by Russian forces.
In May, Shakhidat Baymuradova blew herself up at a Muslim festival, killing at least 16 people in an attempt to assassinate pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov. Russian troops had killed her guerrilla husband in 1999.
Two days earlier, a woman was among rebels who rammed an explosive-laden truck into a government complex in Chechnya, killing more than 45 people.
In June, witnesses reported a woman screaming praise to Allah before blowing up herself and a bus carrying Russian air force staff near Chechnya. At least 18 people died.
"There never used to be suicide bombers involved in the Chechen conflict. This has been brought here from other countries," prosecutor Gen Vladimir Ustinov later told the Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin.
Mr Sergei Ignatchenko, spokesman for Russia's FSB security service, said the suicide attacks bore the hallmark of al-Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups. "According to our information, the suicide bombers are trained abroad, where specialist psychologists work with them until they are ready to die gladly. Then they are sent to Chechnya."
The pro-separatist Kavkaz Centre news agency says all the fighters - men and women - are driven by a desire to avenge crimes committed by Russian forces and by the desire for independence.
"\ cannot understand that someone can voluntarily and independently choose to die for the sake of a higher goal," the agency said after one attack. "A goal motivated by feelings inspired by the savage, inhuman cruelty . . . of the Russian occupying scum."