Chechen Terrorists Came from Yaroslavl

In Moscow, police officers detain suspicious persons

Two female students from the Yaroslavl Drama Institute have recently found themselves in a rather unpleasant situation. Mariam Kulbuzheva and Anna Sokolova (first-year graduates of the institute) were "neutralized" on May 9th in Moscow as Chechen terrorists. The incident happened near the Vakhtangov Theatre. It seemed to police officers, the two girls from the city of Yaroslavl looked very much like Chechen suicide bombers - the Moscow police was on high alert during the long holidays in May. Real Chechen terrorists made their way to Moscow anyway and blew up their bombs during a rock show in Tushino.

Anna and Mariam came to Moscow to have a rest for a long weekend. Their stay in the capital included a visit to the Vakhtangov Theatre. Until recently, Anna Sokolova did not look like a daughter of the mountains, but she dyed her hair and became a brunette. Her friend complied with the interests of the Moscow police, though: her passport was issued in Chechnya, she had her eyebrows in the form of a crescent, and she had an accent. Those peculiarities eventually resulted in a trouble.

An unknown man wearing the civilian clothes called the two girls near the theatre. Anna and Mariam decided that the man was just trying to meet them. The girls did not turn around and continued walking. A police officer grabbed their hands in about a minute:

- Stand still! Your IDs! When did you arrive in Moscow? 
- We came here today.
- Why aren't you registered? 
- We can stay in Moscow for three days without any registration according to the law. 
- This is only when you have tickets.

The girls did not have tickets with them, because the majority of students from Yaroslavl prefer not to buy train tickets to Moscow. The police officer took the girls' passports away and told them to follow him to the police station. I wanted to laugh out loud later on, but at that moment the situation was very unpleasant and stupid," Anna Sokolova said.

The police station was a five-minute walk away, but it took them about 20 minutes to get there. The police officer accused them of lies, dropped various hints, so the girls had an impression that the officer wanted some money. "When we came to the police building, they started looking at us as if we were some animals in a zoo. There were about 25 policemen around us, they were making jokes all the time," Anna recollects.

The formal reason of the detention was unveiled soon: it happened because of the information that Moscow police officers had received from Chechnya. The two students from Yaroslavl matched the description of two female terrorists that had left for Moscow from Chechnya: they were of the same height, the same appearance and even of the same age: all of them were born in 1983. "Police vehicles were coming and going, but the situation was becoming more of a farce. They kept us there for more than an hour, but they did not even search our bags. However, they paid a lot of attention to the X-ray photograph of my tooth that they found in my passport. Probably, they decided that it was a secret microfilm. A police officer even attempted to look me in the mouth to see if the photo matched the real tooth. All that was very unpleasant for Mariam, because she did not have a Russian name and her passport was issued in Chechnya. She even started crying, asking them to let her go, but police officers were not nice to her," Anna Sokolova said.

As a result, the two students from Yaroslavl were released in about an hour. Nobody knows, what police officers wanted from the girls - they did not even put their passport details down. Probably, they wanted a little entertainment.

Alexander Yefremov