#14 - JRL 7238
BBC Monitoring
Chechen rebels drug suicide bombers, including pregnant women - Russia TV
Source: RTR Russia TV, Moscow, in Russian 1000 gmt 24 Jun 03

[Presenter] Another terrorist act, due to have been perpetrated by a woman suicide bomber, has been averted in Chechnya. The details, announced by the antiterrorist headquarters, are shocking.

It has transpired that the would-be martyr was four months pregnant. In order to make her more amenable to committing suicide, the rebels pumped the woman full of drugs and also beat her.

In hospital traces of beating were discovered on her body and psychotropic substances were discovered in her blood.

In the course of an interrogation the woman said she had undergone her preparations for becoming a human bomb in a rebel camp in Chechnya headed by Arab mercenaries. This was announced by Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for the operational headquarters in the North Caucasus, today.

[Shabalkin] We assume that her relatives have disowned her and so when she was detained and put in the medical unit she gave a false name. She says she was kidnapped on 9 February this year and you can imagine what the attitude of the gang towards her was. Nor do we exclude the possibility that she was kidnapped from another region of Russia and brought here. The fact that she speaks rather pure Russian, without any accent, would indicate as much.

[Presenter] Ilya Shabalkin said the bandits were looking for candidates for the suicide missions among Chechen women without any close relatives. Before the execution of an act of terrorism, the rebels as a rule inject the perpetrator with a powerful dose of a psychotropic substance and tell him or her the place where the explosion is to go off.