Moscow Blast Kills Security Officer

A Russian security officer was killed early Thursday on Moscow’s main shopping street while checking a bomb carried by a woman suspected of being a Chechen terrorist, authorities said.

The woman, tentatively identified as Zarema Muzhikhoyeva, 22, a resident of Chechnya, was arrested, police said. She had initially been stopped by restaurant security guards who thought she was acting suspiciously. Some years ago, her husband joined separatist rebels and later was killed, Russian media reported.

Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov swiftly linked the apparent suicide bombing attempt to Saturday’s double-bombing -- also by women -- at the entrance to an open-air rock concert on Moscow’s outskirts, which left 16 dead including the bombers. An airline ticket stub carried by the woman in Thursday’s incident showed that she had arrived in Moscow two days before the concert bombing, Channel One television reported.

“It is already beyond any doubt that a group of terrorists with a centralized command is operating in Russia,” Gryzlov said. “Their goal is to stage acts of terror like this one. We have some information that will very soon allow us to get on the trail of this group that recruits female suicide bombers and sends them to various regions of our country.”

Russian media have started using the term “black widows” to refer to Chechen female suicide bombers. Some use it to describe female terrorists whose husbands -- and often other relatives as well -- have been killed by Russian forces. Others apply it to a specific unit said to have been founded by guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev. He is considered one of the most extreme separatist leaders in the war-torn Chechen republic, and Gryzlov’s comments apparently referred to an alleged group under his control.

In the latest incident, the woman stood for a long time in front of the restaurant on Moscow’s central street. Private guards saw that she was nervous and constantly kept her right hand in a black sports bag, Russian media reported. So someone called police shortly before midnight on Wednesday.

The woman looked like “an ordinary young girl” in her early 20s but “was aggressive with police officers,” Mikhail Galtsev, a police sergeant who arrived at the scene and questioned the woman, said on state-run RTR television. “When we asked her where she was from, she said, ‘It’s none of your business!’ ”

Galtsev said that when asked what was in her bag, the woman replied, “A suicide bomber’s belt.”

“And then she said, ‘Go ahead, push the button and find out,’ ” Galtsev continued. “I approached her and told her, ‘Please lady, let’s carefully take that bag off your shoulder and take a look at what you’ve got there.’ And when we looked inside, we saw wires and a button.”

The bag was placed on the sidewalk, the area was evacuated, and bomb disposal experts arrived. Television later showed them using a remote-controlled device that could move the bag and shoot high-pressure water at it. These efforts went on for more than two hours. Then Georgy Trofimov, 29, a bomb disposal expert with the FSB security force, approached wearing a protective suit. The device exploded as he examined it.

An unidentified female witness who spoke on Channel One television described the scene: “The robot shook the bag, making various manipulations with it. And it was probably when the special services were sure that nothing could happen, that this poor young man who died went to take a look at it. He approached the bag, bent over it, took the package in his hands, and this is when the explosion sounded.”

The bomb was equivalent to about 2 pounds of TNT, authorities said.

In the Saturday concert incident, one of the two bombs only partially exploded, and Trofimov was the expert who dismantled the remainder of that device, Russian media reported.

Gennady N. Seleznyov, speaker of the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, told reporters in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Thursday that the Moscow bombings are Basayev’s doing. “Female suicide bombers who ... Basayev said would soon start their work are doing their job,” he said.

Basayev was quoted in May on a rebel-linked Web site claiming responsibility for two major suicide attacks earlier that month. In the first of those incidents, a woman and one or two men carried out a truck bomb suicide attack that killed at least 59 people at a government complex in northern Chechnya. Two days later, a female suicide bomber killed at least 16 people at a Muslim religious ceremony in a Chechen village.

In his statement on the rebel Web site, Basayev described those incidents as “a tiny part” of a new campaign against “the Russian occupiers and their local lackeys.”

Chechens exercised self-rule after defeating Russian troops in a 1994-96 war. But Russian forces returned in 1999, after a series of apartment house bombings that authorities blamed on Chechen terrorists. They have fought there ever since.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, who rode to power with a tough stance on Chechnya, is now pursuing a two-pronged strategy to pacify the Caucasus republic by crushing pro-independence forces militarily while granting limited autonomy to a new Chechen government. As part of that process, a Chechen presidential election has been set for Oct. 5.