Two Russian passenger jets, Tu-134 and Tu-154, crashed almost simultaneously on Aug. 24 after taking off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport, killing all the 90 people aboard and raising fears of a terrorist attack.

Investigation results showed that an airline employee responsible for passenger boarding seated one of the two suspected woman attackers on a plane "in violation of all regulations and after being bribed," Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said.

Both the two suspects, Satsita Jebirkhanova and Aminat Nagayeva,were from Chechnya. On the evening of Aug. 24, they arrived at the Domodedovo airport from the southern town of Makhachkala accompanied by two other Chechens.

Patrol police, identifying the two women as suspicious persons,later confiscated their passports and handed them over to an officer in charge of counter-terrorism at the airport, Ustinov said.

But the officer released them without carrying out any document checks or physical searches, he added.

They then paid a middle man, identified as Armen Arutyunov, a total of 5,000 rubles (170 US dollars), and one of them purchased a plane ticket under the name Dzhebirkhanova for a flight that was scheduled for the next day.

With the help of Arutyunov, she bribed an employee of Sibir airlines with 1,000 rubles (34 dollars) to get on board the TU-154 flight two minutes before check-in was over, Ustinov said.

He did not elaborate on how the other alleged suicide bomber boarded the TU-134 plane, but local media said the middle man alsohelped her get on the plane after she paid a bribe.

Ustinov said both Arutyunov and the airline employee were arrested.

The prosecutor general also acknowledged that corruption has reached dangerous proportions in Russia.

Ustinov said an investigation carried out by the prosecutor's office had "uncovered 22,000 cases of corruption in only six months" at different state institutions. He added that Russian authorities were currently looking into how the country's anti-corruption laws were being implemented.