Shock revelation (russians liars and brutal pigs) [Gosh, can it be true?]
- From: "santaka13@xxxxxxxxx" <santaka13@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 29 Dec 2005 04:10:00 -0800
December 29, 2005
Report on Russia Massacre Faults Officials
By C. J. CHIVERS
MOSCOW, Dec. 28 - The chief of a Russian parliamentary commission on
Wednesday criticized the official handling of the terrorist seizure of
a school in Beslan last year, saying in a public report that an
investigation he headed had found "miscalculations and drawbacks" in
the authorities' work and that the siege could have been prevented if
the local police had done their jobs.
The three-day ordeal that began on the first day of school in September
last year was the worst terrorist act in modern Russian history. It
ended with the deaths of 331 people, 186 of them children, and raised
questions about the readiness of Russia's military and law enforcement
agencies, as well as the Kremlin's truthfulness and ability to manage
the government during fast-moving events.
The long-expected report, read aloud in Parliament by Aleksandr P.
Torshin, the chief of the special commission and vice chairman of
Russia's upper house, was the most detailed and coherent account by the
federal government of the events surrounding the siege. But it left
persistent questions unanswered, and assigned much of the
responsibility for the failures to local, not federal, law enforcement
agencies.
Unlike accounts from survivors, witnesses and journalists who were
present in Beslan and who have been almost uniformly critical of the
federal response and obfuscation, Mr. Torshin criticized the federal
government only indirectly.
"The coordination among the law enforcement bodies was weak," he said,
in an implicit comment on the work of the federal security agencies
whose forces assembled around the school, including the Russian Army
and domestic intelligence service, or F.S.B.
Mr. Torshin described his remarks, read from a document he did not
release to the public, as an intermediate report. He said his final
report, expected in the spring, would address federal actions as well.
Still, the commission's report was much more critical of Russian
officials and the level of law enforcement readiness than previous
federal accounts, which were disclosed by the prosecutor general's
office. As recently as Tuesday, the prosecutor's office issued a
statement saying its "expert commission" had found no basis for blaming
the authorities for any harmful consequences related to the siege.
Mr. Torshin took a different position. He noted that the local
intelligence and police services in Ingushetia, where the terrorists
trained for their attack, and in North Ossetia, where Beslan is
situated, had failed to follow federal intelligence warnings in the
summer of 2004 that there were terrorist risks to schools.
The local authorities, he said, did not adequately provide security on
the first day of class, as the federal police had ordered. "That could
have prevented the terrorist attack," he said.
Mr. Torshin also said the terrorists who were preparing the siege had
been encamped for six days in Ingushetia, just 70 yards from a road and
500 yards from Psedakh, a village 18 miles north of Beslan, but had
gone undetected by the Ingush police. "The militants did not even
hide," he said.
Moreover, he accused the chief of the North Ossetian intelligence
service, Maj. Gen. Valery A. Andreyev, of providing inaccurate
information to the public during the siege, by repeatedly insisting
that there were only 354 hostages when he knew there were more than
1,100.
The authorities' insistence on the lower number infuriated local
families, creating distractions during the siege and poisoning
relations with the authorities that continue to this day. General
Andreyev has since been reassigned.
Mr. Torshin also said contact with the terrorists was not established
until the end of the first day of the siege because there was a mistake
in the telephone number given by the terrorists. The notion that the
authorities could not telephone the terrorists was harshly critical on
its face. An employee for The New York Times was able to speak with one
of the terrorists a few hours into the siege by simply calling the
school's publicly listed number.
Parts of the report embraced and summarized important elements of the
official version that had previously been disclosed, including the
conclusion that there were 32 terrorists, including two women, and that
only one of the group, a young man now on trial, survived. Many victims
have insisted that more terrorists were present.
It also defended foundations of the government's response to previous
criticism, saying it was unlikely that rockets fired by federal troops
during the final battle had caused the fire in the gymnasium, where the
preponderance of the hostages were held and scores died.
It further noted that a theory briefly popular in the Russian press,
that a Russian sniper initiated the blasts by shooting a terrorist
standing on a bomb trigger, had no merit. The gymnasium's windows were
opaque, Mr. Torshin said, and such a shot was not possible. Many
survivors and families have also said the theory was weak.
The report also broadly assigned blame to Chechnya's separatists for
planning and carrying out the siege, a position consistent with the
Kremlin's practice of lumping the separatists together.
Shamil Basayev, a terrorist leader, has claimed responsibility for the
attack. Mr. Torshin said, however, that Aslan Maskhadov, who was then
president of the underground rebel government, was also behind it. Mr.
Maskhadov, who was killed early this year, had spoken against the
attack, and his relatives insist that he had tried to persuade Mr.
Basayev not to repeat such tactics.
His son, Anzor Maskhadov, dismissed Mr. Torshin's claim. "This is
nothing but delirium," he said, in an e-mail message sent to The New
York Times. His father, he said, "was against such actions."
In spite of many areas of specificity, Mr. Torshin noted that there was
much more work to do to answer lingering questions, including what
caused the two large explosions on Sept. 3, which marked the beginning
of the final battle, as well as who financed the attack. He said some
remaining questions were proving difficult to investigate, as
survivors' accounts were often "fantastically contradictory."
Reaction to the report was mixed. Rita Sidakova, a deputy chairwoman of
the Beslan Mothers Committee, a group of mothers who lost children in
the siege that has campaigned bitterly against the government for its
handling of the crisis, said in a telephone interview that Mr.
Torshin's positions were a step forward.
"We praise the fact that at least something has been voiced," she said.
"I mean the discrepancy in the number of hostages and the lack of
coordination in the operative staff." Ms. Sidakova's 9-year-old
daughter, Alla, died in the siege.
Ella Kesayeva, chairwoman of a group called Voice of Beslan, told the
Regnum news agency that she was "categorically against such commissions
that give the victims only empty hopes."
"We expected a completed report, and instead of it we were read out a
draft with well-rounded formulations," she said. "Everybody lies: the
prosecutor general's office, the courts, the commissions and the
authorities."
Kazbek Misikov, a former hostage who was wounded in the siege, as were
his wife and two sons, was also unsatisfied. He met with the
commission's investigators, he said, but Mr. Torshin's report ignored
his account of seeing more than 32 terrorists, including at least one
other woman. "Everything that I said to them went to the sand," he said
in a telephone interview.
Stanislav M. Kesayev, the chief of a regional commission that also
investigated the siege and has described the federal handling as
incompetent, said that he wanted to study the parliamentary report
closely, but that elements of its work appeared credible.
"The first step has been made," he said in a telephone interview. "I
hope that in the final variant of the report we will find answers to
many questions."
Copyright NY Times 2005 - For educational porpoises.
.
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