They chose to stay in Russia instead, deciding to fly to the Black Sea resort of Sochi last Monday. Zvyagintseva, 21, however, took so long to pack for her first trip with her husband that they missed the plane.
The next evening the couple returned to the airport to take their seats on flight 1047, relieved to be finally on their way. Minutes before takeoff, the bride called her father Anatoly on her mobile phone to share her joy with him.
One hour and 14 minutes after it left the airport, the Tupolev-154 belonging to Sibir Air, Russia’s second largest domestic carrier, disappeared from the radar, plunging to earth from 39,000ft. Stepanov, 27, a lift engineer, and Zvyagintseva, a computer sales assistant, were among the 46 people on board who all lost their lives.
Three minutes earlier, flight 1303 from Moscow to Volgograd, operated by Volga-Avia- express, a tiny local airline, also crashed and disintegrated. All 44 passengers and crew on board the Tupolev-134 died.
“Larissa and Alexei were on the plane by pure chance,” said Anatoly Zvyagintseva. “If she had received her passport in time or even hurried up a little they would both be alive now.
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“They were so happy to be married. Now all we are left with is the thought of burying them together.”
The Russian authorities initially suggested that the disasters could have been the result of human error or “bad fuel” — provoking a scathing reaction from sections of the press which pointed out the extreme unlikelihood of two planes suffering such accidents within minutes of each other.
However, following the discovery in the wreckage of flight 1047 of traces of hexogen, an explosive used in previous Chechen attacks, the Russian authorities had conceded that terrorism was to blame.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) confirmed yesterday that traces of the same explosives had been found in the wreckage of the second plane It also emerged that the Tupolev-154 had sent at least two distress signals — an SOS followed by a hijack alert.
Nikolai Zakharov, an FSB spokesman, said investigators had “defined a circle of individuals possibly involved in conducting the terrorist act”, but was unclear how broad that circle might be.
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Suspicion pointed to two suspected “black widows”, female Chechen suicide bombers, apparently determined to strike a blow against the Kremlin in the run-up to today’s elections in the break-away Caucasian republic.
The suspected “widow” on flight 1047 was S Dzhebirkhanova, a young woman believed to be a Chechen who boarded the plane after changing her ticket for an earlier flight.
She is believed to have travelled in seat 19F, near the back of the passenger cabin. The tail of the plane was found severed from the fuselage. after the crash.
Suspiciously, none of Dzhebirkhanova’s relatives or friends has come forward since the disaster to claim her remains.
No next of kin have been identified either for Amanta Nagayeva, 27, the suspected terrorist on the other plane. Registered on the passenger list as living in Grozny, the Chechen capital, she was the last person to buy a ticket for flight 1303, only an hour before takeoff.
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It emerged yesterday that she was a market trader whose brother disappeared four years ago after he was detained by Russian troops. It is also believed that she once lived in a small village in southern Chechnya where an Islamic militant ran a terrorist training camp. Her remains were found in small fragments, suggesting she had blown herself up.
The mystery remained how the bombers managed to smuggle their explosives on board. Domodedovo airport, which the two flights left within 46 minutes of each other, was overhauled two years ago and re-equipped with the latest baggage scanning technology and dogs trained to spot explosives.
The facilities at the airport, which handles 10m passengers a year, are the most advanced of those at the Russian capital’s three main airports and it is used by several foreign carriers such as BA.
Ivor Levitin, the transport minister, said controls at Domodeovo had been investigated in May and found lacking. It was not clear if the necessary changes had been implemented.
Yulia Masanova, a spokeswoman for East Line, which runs security there, admitted it would be relatively easy to smuggle a bomb onto a plane. “We have the equipment but not every single bag is checked for explosives,” she said. “It’s up to specially trained staff to decide which piece to check.”
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Viktor Dennikov, a Moscow-based security expert, agreed: “Suicide bombers’ belts do not ring when they pass a metal detector unless they are packed with ball bearings,” he said.
The Russian media also speculated that the two women may have been supplied with explosives by an accomplice working inside the airport.
Regardless of how they smuggled the explosives on board, the bombers’ apparent success in penetrating Russian security is an undoubted embarrassment to President Vladimir Putin in the run-up to today’s Chechen poll, expected to be won by Alu Alkhanov, the republic’s pro-Moscow interior minister.
Putin claims that the poll, prompted by the killing of Akhmad Kadyrov, the former president, in May, will bring stability to the region but many Chechens have denounced the poll in advance as rigged and dismiss Alkhanov as the Kremlin’s puppet.
Earlier in the week, representatives of Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen rebel leader, denied any connection to the crashes. But Maskhadov, who led Chechnya during its 1996-99 period of de-facto independence, is believed to control only a small portion of Chechnya’s fighters.