“Your children are not children. Russians have children, not Chechens. My dog is worth more than your tar baby,” was how Asya Musayeva said she was greeted by one Russian woman as she sat at a playground with her young nephew.

Musayeva, a 36-year-old Chechen woman employed as a senior executive at a Moscow firm, said daily life for her and other Chechen women living in Russian cities had in recent weeks become an exercise in fear management.

“I have been feeling looks of hatred on the streets, at the entrance to my apartment, everywhere,” said Tamara Kantayeva, a 48-year-old Chechen widow.

“Psychologically it is really hard,” said Kantayeva, who fled to Russia with her four children at the start of the second Chechen war in 1999.

Russian investigators and press reports laid the blame for recent attacks on two passenger airliners and a crowded Moscow metro station squarely on three female suicide bombers from Chechnya.

And at least one newspaper has suggested ominously that a ‘black widow’ bent on revenge for the death of a husband, father, or brother killed by Russian troops, is lurking in Moscow waiting for the signal to strike.

Some Chechen women said the fear that has swept Russia has translated into constant identity checks and humiliating questioning by police.

Kantayeva said she suffered humiliating treatment at the hands of police officers recently after she was arrested while crossing a Moscow street with two female relatives.

“The police officers threatened to hit me in the face if I didn’t climb into their car to go to the station,” she said.

“There, they asked us what we were doing in Moscow, how many teeth we had, how tall we were, what our shoe size was, if we had any scars on our body.

“They accused us of coming to Moscow to bomb their homes. I was ashamed, the whole procedure was so humiliating,” she said.

Tatyana Kasatkina, executive director of the Moscow-based human rights organization Memorial, said it was still too early to produce reliable data that would confirm a rise in harassment of Chechen women in the capital.

But she said people from the Caucasus region in general were routinely the target of racist violence by police, neo-Nazi skinheads, and other groups, and said the trend had worsened in recent weeks, notably for Chechens.

“Chechen people have been treated badly for a long time, but it has got worse since the terror attacks,” Kasatkina said.

Stung by reports of the Chechen terrorists in the Russian press, both Musayeva and Kantayeva strongly condemned the attacks and stressed that they were as likely to be victims of such strikes as any other Russians.

“How long will we have to pay for the fact that we stayed alive after these bloody wars, that we came here to Moscow?” asked Kantayeva, referring to two wars, the second of which is still continuing, between Russian federal troops and Chechen separatist forces.

“When Russians blame us for the violence, they forget that we walk on the same streets as them, that we visit the same places, that we are, just like them, living targets for terrorists,” Musayeva said.

Both women say they are doing their best to keep a cool head and fight feelings of anger in the face of the enmity they now meet on the streets of Moscow. But it is not always easy. “I am trying as hard as I can to keep anger out of my heart,” said Kantayeva. CHECHEN REBEL CLAIMS HIS FIGTHERS CARRIED OUT BESLAN SEIGE

Meanwhile, Chechnya's feared warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility Friday for the deadly school hostage taking in southern Russia that killed more than 330 people, half of them children, according to a rebel website.

Rebels commanded by Basayev have "carried out a series of successful military operations," including "the operation in the town of Beslan," said a letter signed by the 39-year-old and posted on the rebel website kavkazcenter.com.

Its authenticity could not be immediately verified, but Chechen rebels often post their statements on the site.

Russian considers the rebel leader its public enemy number one and has offered a 10 milllion-dollar reward both for Basayev and another, more moderate Chechen rebel chief, Aslan Maskhadov.