Moscow: A manhunt is under way for two residents of Russia's Muslim Ingushetia region who law enforcement officers believe coordinated the bombing of Moscow's Domodedovo airport two weeks ago, Interfax reported on Sunday.
Unnamed officials in Russia's North Caucasus region also told the news agency they believed Magomed Yevloyev, a 20-year-old from Ingushetia, was the suicide bomber in the attack that killed 36 people at the country's busiest airport.
No one has claimed responsibility for the January 24 attack but it bore the hallmarks of Islamist rebels from the North Caucasus who are fighting to carve out a separate Islamic state. They have vowed further attacks across Russia in the run-up to a presidential election in 2012.
"Presently we have put two young men on a wanted list who have disappeared," Interfax quoted an unnamed law enforcement source as saying. He said the two men, along with Yevloyev, had left their village of Ali-Yurt, just southeast of Ingushetia's largest city Nazran, several days before the Moscow bombing.
Islamist rebel leader Doku Umarov vowed in a video posted late on Friday to bring 'blood and tears' to Russia this year. He also said a rebel shown standing beside him, whom he named as Seifullah, was planning 'a special operation'.
The 12-minute clip, posted on several insurgency-affiliated sites, made no reference to the airport bombing and did not say when it was filmed, leading Russian media to speculate that it was made before the attack and that Seifullah was the bomber.
"He (Seifullah) very much resembles a photograph of Magomed Yevloyev," opposition paper Novaya Gazeta wrote.
A decade after federal forces drove separatists out of power in the second of two wars in Chechnya, the North Caucasus is plagued by violence the Kremlin has failed to quell or contain.
Impoverished Ingushetia - a sliver of land next to Chechnya - was the heart of the insurgency two years ago, though the epicenter of violence has now moved to Dagestan.