RFE/RL Organized Crime and Terrorism Watch Vol. 3, No. 42, 18 December 2003

Reporting on Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism in the former USSR, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East

THE OCTOBER 2002 MOSCOW HOSTAGE-TAKING INCIDENT (Part 1)

By John B. Dunlop

On 6 November 2002, a meeting was held in Moscow of the Public Committee to Investigate the Circumstances Behind the Explosions of the Apartment Buildings in Moscow and the Ryazan Exercises (all of which occurred in September 1999). The meeting took place at the Andrei Sakharov Center, and among those present were the committee's chairman, Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalev, its deputy chairman, Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov (assassinated on 17 April 2003), lawyer Boris Zolotukhin, writer Aleksandr Tkachenko, journalist Otto Latsis, and human rights activist Valerii Borshchev. After the meeting had concluded, the members of the committee took a formal decision to "broaden its mandate" and to include the Moscow hostage-taking episode of 23-26 October 2002 -- and especially the actions of the Russian special services during that period -- as an additional subject of inquiry coming under the committee's purview.(1)

AN UNUSUAL KIND OF 'JOINT VENTURE'?

The following is an attempt to make some sense out of the small torrent of information that exists concerning the October 2002 events at Dubrovka. In my opinion, the original plan for the terrorist action at and around Dubrovka bears a strong similarity to the campaign of terror bombings unleashed upon Moscow and other Russian urban centers (Buinaksk, Volgodonsk) in September of 1999. In both cases there is strong evidence of official involvement in, and manipulation of, key actions; so the question naturally arises as to whether Vladimir Putin in any way sanctioned them. Although there is additional evidence bearing on Putin's possible role, this paper will take an agnostic position on the issue, and will also not review it.

The October 2002 hostage-taking episode in a large theater containing close to 1,000 people was evidently, at least in its original conception, to have been preceded and accompanied by terror bombings claiming the lives of perhaps hundreds of Muscovites, a development that would have terrorized and enraged the populace of the entire country. However, in view of the suspicious connections and motivations of the perpetrators of this incident, as well as the contradictory nature of the actions of the authorities, it would seem appropriate to envisage this operation as representing a kind of "joint venture" (on, for example, the model of the August 1999 incursion into Daghestan) involving elements of the Russian special services and also radical Chechen leaders such as Shamil Basaev and Movladi Udugov.

Only a few individuals among the special services and the Chechen extremist leadership would likely have known of the existence of this implicit deal. Both "partners" had a strong motive to derail the movement occurring in Russia, and being backed by the West, to bring about a negotiated settlement to the Chechen conflict. Both also wanted to blacken the reputation of the leader of the Chechen separatist moderates, Aslan Maskhadov. In addition, the Chechen extremists clearly saw their action as a kind of ambitious fund-raiser aimed at attracting financial support from wealthy donors in the Gulf states and throughout the Muslim world (hence the signs displayed in Arabic, the non-traditional [for Chechens] garb of the female terrorists, and so on). The Russian authorities, for their part, had a propitious chance to depict the conflict in Chechnya as a war against an Al-Qaeda-type Chechen terrorism, a message that could be expected to play well abroad, and especially in the United States.

As in the case of the 1999 terror bombings, meticulous planning -- including the use of "cut-outs," false documents, and the secret transport of weapons and explosives to Moscow from the North Caucasus region -- underlay the preparation for this terrorist assault. In this instance, however, the perpetrators were to be seen as Chechens of a "Wahhabi" orientation whose modus operandi was to recall that of the notorious Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Once the operation had moved into its active stage, however, strange and still not fully explained developments began to occur. An explosion at a McDonald's restaurant in southwest Moscow on 19 October immediately riveted the attention of the Moscow Criminal Investigation (MUR) -- an elite unit of the regular police -- which then moved swiftly to halt the activity of the terrorists. The explosion at the McDonald's restaurant was, fortunately, a small one, and caused the death of only a single person. Two large bombs set to explode before the assault on Dubrovka was launched failed to detonate. Likewise a planned bombing incident at a large restaurant in Pushkin Square in the center of the capital failed to take place.

In my opinion, the most likely explanation for these "technical" failures lies in acts of intentional sabotage committed by some of the terrorists. What remains unclear at this juncture is why certain individuals among the terrorists chose to render the explosive devices incapable of functioning. One key point, however, seems clear: The Chechen extremist leaders felt no pressing need to blow up or shoot hundreds of Russian citizens. They were aware that such actions might so enrage the Russian populace that it would then have supported any military actions whatever, including a possible full-scale extermination of the Chechen people. So what Shamil Basaev, Aslambek Khaskhanov, and their comrades in arms seem to have done is, in a sense, to outplay the special services in a game of chess. Most of the bombs, it turns out, were actually fakes, while the few women's terrorist belts that did actually contain explosives were of danger primarily to the women themselves. As Russian security affairs correspondent Pavel Felgenhauer has rightly suggested, the aim of the extremist leaders seems to have been to force the Russian special services to kill ethnic Russians on a large scale, and that is what happened.(2) Only an adroit cover-up by the Russian authorities prevented the full extent (conceivably more than 200 deaths) of the debacle from becoming known.

A central question to be resolved by future researchers is whether or not the Russian special forces planning an assault on the theater building at Dubrovka were aware that virtually all of the bombs located there -- including all of the powerful and deadly bombs -- were in fact incapable of detonating. If the special forces were aware of this, then there was clearly no need to employ a potentially lethal gas, which, it turned out, caused the deaths of a large number of the hostages. The special forces could have relatively easily and rapidly overwhelmed the lightly armed terrorists. Moreover, if they were in fact aware that the bombs were "dummies," then the special forces obviously had no need to kill all of the terrorists, especially those who were asleep from the effects of the gas. It would, one would think, have made more sense to take some of them alive.

PRESSURE BUILDS FOR A NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT WITH THE CHECHEN SEPARATISTS

In the months preceding the terrorist act at the Dubrovka theater, which was putting on a popular musical, "Nord-Ost," the Kremlin leadership found itself coming under heavy political pressure both within Russia and in the West to enter into high-level negotiations with the moderate wing of the Chechen separatists headed by Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected Chechen president in 1997. Public-opinion polls in Russia showed that a continuation of the Chechen conflict was beginning to erode Putin's generally high approval ratings. With parliamentary elections scheduled for just over a year's time (in December 2003), this represented a worrisome problem for the Kremlin. In a poll taken by the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), whose findings were reported on 8 October, respondents were asked "how the situation in Chechnya has changed since V. Putin was elected president."(3) Thirty percent of respondents believed that the situation had "gotten better," but 43 percent opined that it had "not changed," while 21 percent thought that it had "gotten worse." These results were significantly lower than Putin's ratings in other categories. In similar fashion, a September 2002 Russia-wide poll taken by VTsIOM found 56 percent of respondents favoring peace negotiations as a way to end the Chechen conflict while only 34 percent supported the continuing of military actions.(4)

On 16-19 August 2002, key discussions had occurred in the Duchy of Liechtenstein involving two former speakers of the Russian parliament, Ivan Rybkin and Ruslan Khasbulatov, as well as two deputies of the Russian State Duma: journalist and leading "democrat" Yurii Shchekochikhin (died, possibly from the effects of poison, on 3 July 2003) and Aslambek Aslakhanov, a retired Interior Ministry general who had been elected to represent Chechnya in the Duma. Representing separatist leader Maskhadov at the talks was Chechen Deputy Prime Minister Akhmed Zakaev. The talks in Liechtenstein had been organized by the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (executive director, Glen Howard), one of whose leading figures was former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. The meetings in Liechtenstein were intended to restore the momentum that had been created by earlier talks held at Sheremetevo-2 Airport outside of Moscow between Zakaev and Putin's plenipotentiary presidential representative in the Southern Federal District, retired military General Viktor Kazantsev, on 18 November 2001.(5) Efforts to resuscitate the talks had failed to achieve any success because of the strong opposition of the Russian side.

Following the stillborn initiative of November 2001, the Kremlin had apparently jettisoned the idea of holding any negotiations whatsoever with moderate separatists in favor of empowering its handpicked candidate for Chechen leader, former mufti Akhmad Kadyrov. This tactic, said to be backed by Aleksandr Voloshin, the then presidential chief of staff, soon became known as "Chechenization." Other elements among the top leadership of the presidential administration, such as two deputy chiefs of staff, Viktor Ivanov -- a former deputy director of the FSB -- and Igor Sechin, as well as certain leaders in the so-called power ministries, for example, Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Nikolai Patrushev, were reported to be adamantly opposed both to Chechenization and, even more so, to holding talks with moderate separatists; what they wanted was aggressively to pursue the war to a victorious conclusion.(6) If that effort took years more to achieve, then so be it.

In a path-breaking report on the meetings in Liechtenstein, a leading journalist who frequently publishes in the weekly "Moskovskie novosti," Sanobar Shermatova, wrote that the participants had discussed two peace plans: the so-called "Khasbulatov plan" and the so-called "Brzezinski plan."(7) Eventually, she went on, the participants decided to merge the two plans into a "Liechtenstein plan," which included elements of both. Khasbulatov's plan was based on the idea of granting to Chechnya "special status," with international guarantees being provided by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and by the Council of Europe. Under Khasbulatov's plan, Chechnya would be free to conduct its own internal and foreign policies, with the exception of those functions that it voluntarily delegated to the Russian Federation. The republic was to remain within Russian borders and was to preserve Russian citizenship and currency.

Under the "Brzezinski plan," Chechens would "acknowledge their respect for the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation," while Russia, for its part, would "acknowledge the right of the Chechens to political, though not national, self-determination." A referendum would be held under which "Chechens would be given the opportunity to approve the constitutional basis for extensive self-government" modeled on what the Republic of Tatarstan currently enjoys. Russian troops would remain stationed on Chechnya's southern borders. "International support," the plan stressed, "must be committed to a substantial program of economic reconstruction, with a direct international presence on the ground in order to promote the rebuilding and stabilization of Chechen society." The authors of this plan underlined that "Maskhadov's endorsement of such an approach would be essential because of the extensive support he enjoys within Chechen society."

On 17 October 2002 -- just six days before the terrorist incident at Dubrovka -- the website grani.ru, citing information that had previously appeared in the newspaper "Kommersant," reported that new meetings of the Liechtenstein group were scheduled to be held in two weeks' time.(8) Duma Deputy Aslakhanov and separatist Deputy Premier Zakaev were planning to meet one-on-one in Switzerland in order "seriously to discuss the conditions which could lead to negotiations." Former speakers Rybkin and Khasbulatov, the website added, would also be taking part in the negotiations. In mid-October, Aslakhanov emphasized in a public statement: "President Putin has not once expressed himself against negotiations with Maskhadov. To the contrary, in a conversation with me, he expressed doubt whether there was a real force behind Maskhadov. Would the people follow after him?" This question put by Putin to Aslakhanov, "Kommersant vlast" reporter Olga Allenova observed, "was perceived in the ranks of the separatists as a veiled agreement [by Putin] to negotiations."(9)

On 10 September 2002, former Russian Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov had published an essay entitled "Six Points On Chechnya" on the pages of the official Russian government newspaper "Rossiiskaya Gazeta" in which he stressed the urgent need to conduct "negotiations with [separatist] field commanders or at least some of them."(10) "This struggle," Primakov insisted, "can be stopped only through negotiations. Consequently elections in Chechnya cannot be seen as an alternative to negotiations." Primakov also underlined his conviction that "the [Russian] military must not play the dominant role in the settlement." In an interview which appeared in the 4 October 2002 issue of "Nezavisimaya gazeta," Salambek Maigov, co-chairman of the Antiwar Committee of Chechnya, warmly praised Primakov's "Six Points," noting, "Putin and Maskhadov can find compromise decisions. But the problem is that there are groups in the Kremlin which hinder this process."

During September 2002, grani.ru reported that both Maigov and former Duma Speaker Ivan Rybkin were supporting a recent suggestion by Primakov that "the status of Finland in the [tsarist] Russian Empire can suit the Chechen Republic."(11) Another possibility, Rybkin pointed out, would be for Chechnya to be accorded "the status of a disputed territory, such as was held by the Aland Islands [of Finland], to which both Sweden and Finland had earlier made claims." A broad spectrum of Russian political leaders -- from "democrats" like Grigorii Yavlinskii, Boris Nemtsov, and Sergei Kovalev to Gennadii Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation -- had, Rybkin said, expressed an interest in such models.

During the course of a lengthy interview -- whose English translation appeared on the separatist website chechenpress.com on 23 October (the day of the seizure of the hostages in Moscow) -- President Maskhadov warmly welcomed the intensive efforts being made to bring about a negotiated settlement to the Chechen conflict: "In Dr. Brzezinski's plan," Maskhadov commented, "we see the concern of influential forces in the United States.... We have a positive experience of collaboration with Ivan Petrovich Rybkin [the reference is to the year 1997, when Rybkin was secretary of the Russian Security Council].... If Yevgenii Primakov speaks of the possibility of a peace resolution, it is a good sign.... The Chechen party would willingly collaborate with the academician [Primakov]. And, finally, with respect to Ruslan Khasbulatov's plan,... we welcome the actions of Khasbulatov.... This plan can be the subject for negotiations."

It appears that Maskhadov was at this time also engaging in secret talks with a high-ranking representative of President Putin. "Into contact with the president of [the Chechen Republic of] Ichkeria, who was on the wanted list," journalist Sanobar Shermatova reported in February of 2003, "there entered such a high-ranking [Russian] official that he was threatened by no unpleasantness whatsoever by the law-enforcement organs for communicating with the Chechen leader."(12)

THE FSB SUPPRESSES A PROMISING PEACEMAKING EFFORT

It emerged at this time that Putin had also permitted his special representative for human rights in Chechnya, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, an ethnic Chechen, to meet with Chechen deputies who had been elected to the separatist parliament in 1997. On 13 October, 10 days before the hostage-taking incident at Dubrovka, Sultygov met in Znamenskoe, the district center of Nadterechnyi District in northern Chechnya, with 14 such deputies. Observers from the OSCE's mission in Znamenskoe were said to have been involved in preparing the meeting. At the meeting, Sultygov and the Chechen deputies discussed ways of bringing about a political regulation of the crisis and also the need to observe human rights in Chechnya.

According to a website associated with the leading Russian human rights organization Memorial (http://www.hro.org), the FSB of Chechnya headed by General Sergei Babkin (an organization in strict subordination to the FSB of Russia) moved aggressively to quash this nascent peacemaking effort.(13) A mere 100 meters away from Sultygov's office in Znamenskoe, hro.org reported, the separatist parliamentarians were taken into custody by armed masked men, who then escorted them to the central FSB office in Nadterechnoe. Each separatist deputy was then interrogated by the FSB department head, Mairbek Khusuev, who subjected them, inter alia, to "insulting remarks." Sultygov, Memorial concluded, came to understand "the decisiveness of his [FSB] opponents who were not deterred by the presence of international observers [from the OSCE]. The breaking off of negotiations...is evidently profitable for the adherents of the force variant."

As this incident demonstrates, key elements among the "siloviki," or power ministries, were adamantly opposed to conducting peace negotiations with separatists and, moreover, to bringing an end to a war that was serving as a source of promotions in rank and of lucrative "financial flows." It seems likely that President Putin's intention was to project the appearance of a willingness to acquiesce to the peacemaking activities of Aslakhanov, Sultygov and others, as a largely symbolic sop to the Europeans. On 21 October, two days before the Dubrovka incident, the president's official spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhembskii, announced that there could be no negotiations on the conditions set by the rebels and that "only the official representative of Russia, Viktor Kazantsev, is to conduct negotiations with the separatists, while the remaining initiatives [such as those of Aslakhanov and Sultygov] are deemed to be personal ones."(14)

The involvement of the OSCE in the events in Znamenskoe was an indication that some Western European governments (as well as the United States) were becoming involved in the quest for a solution to a seemingly intractable conflict. At the time of the Dubrovka episode, Denmark was serving as host for a two-day conference on Chechnya attended by some 100 separatists, human rights activists, and parliamentarians. Maskhadov's spokesman, Zakaev, was one of the event's featured speakers.(15)

At this time, other pressures, too, were being brought to bear on the Kremlin to enter into peace negotiations. To cite one example, on 18 October, five days before the Dubrovka incident, a conference entitled "Chechen Dead End: Where To Seek The Peace?" was held at the centrally located Hotel Rossiya in Moscow.(16) The conference had been organized by the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia. Among those who addressed the congress were Duma faction leader Nemtsov, former Duma Speaker Rybkin, Maigov, and Akhmed-Khadzhi Shamaev, the (pro-Moscow) mufti of the Chechen Republic.

It should be underscored that there also existed a significant group of Chechens who complemented the influential and retrograde elements of the FSB and other power structures on the Russian side adamantly opposed to a peace settlement with Maskhadov. These elements consisted of extremist or "Wahhabi" elements among the separatists. The central figure of this group within Chechnya was, of course, the legendary field commander Shamil Basaev, and, abroad, said to be living in the Gulf states, Basaev's partners, the former Chechen First Deputy Premier and Minister of Information Movladi Udugov and former acting President Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. On 4 October, a website affiliated with this group, Kavkaz Center (http://www.kavkaz.org), lambasted the involvement of Ruslan Khasbulatov and Aslambek Aslakhanov in the peace process. Khasbulatov, the website remarked scathingly, "wants to be the Kremlin's only 'man' in Chechnya and to have a full mandate for talks with rebel president Aslan Maskhadov," while Aslakhanov, in the website's view, was serving as Khasbulatov's "power-wielding" assistant seeking to gain control of all the Russian forces in Chechnya.(17)

SETTING THE STAGE

One of the key questions confronting any examination of the Dubrovka events remains how it was possible that such a collection of suspicious individuals could gather and furtive activities occur in and around Moscow over a period of months. Moreover, the provenance of some of the players -- coupled with reports that several of the participants among the hostage takers had already been in the custody of the Russian authorities -- only serves to sharpen this issue.

THE TERRORIST ACTION TAKES SHAPE

The activities that culminated in the hostage seizure took place over a period of more than half a year. In February 2002, eight months before the hostage-taking incident, two Chechen terrorists, "Zaurbek" (real name: Aslambek Khaskhanov) and "Abubakar," also known as "Yasir" (real name: Ruslan Elmurzaev), set the future terrorist act at Dubrovka in motion when they approached a third Chechen, Akhyad Mezhiev, in Ingushetia, where Mezhiev was wont to make regular visits to a cousin living in that republic.(18) Mezhiev had been born in the village of Makhkety, in the Vedeno District of Chechnya, but had managed to acquire legal residency in Moscow even before the first Chechen war. "In terms of an ultimatum, they demanded that Mezhiev assist them, threatening otherwise to take revenge against his relatives living in Chechnya." Mezhiev was provided with a false internal passport, and his brother, Alikhan, was also drawn into the plot. Later Khaskhanov was to provide Alikhan with $2,500 with which to buy two vehicles intended to be used as car bombs. (These vehicles were said to have been purchased during the period August-September 2002.)

According to a June 2003 statement made by the then chief procurator of the city of Moscow, Mikhail Avdyukov, Aslambek Khaskhanov had been closely acquainted with terrorist leader Shamil Basaev. "Still in 2001, in the village of Starye Atagi," Avdyukov related, "he [Khaskhanov] received an assignment from Basaev, through a certain Edaev, to commit a series of terrorist acts in Moscow. Later when Edaev had been killed... Shamil Basaev himself directly confirmed the assignment to Khaskhanov. The terrorist acts were to consist of a series of 'actions of intimidation.'"(19) Avdyukov's statement continued: "He [Khaskhanov] was commanded to head a group and carry out in Moscow four large terrorist acts with the use of explosives in crowded places. In addition to himself, the group also consisted of Aslan Murdalov, the brothers Alikhan and Akhyad Mezhiev, Khampasha Sobraliev, and Arman Menkeev. All of them are now under arrest."

In April 2002, another member of the Chechen terrorist group, the already-mentioned Khampash Sobraliev, purchased a substantial property at House No. 100 on Nosovikhinskii Highway in the village of Chernoe, Balashikhinskii District, Moscow Oblast. The asking price for the property was said to have been $20,000. A family of Chechens then moved in: "Pavel [i.e., Khampash]...and two young women." The two women appear to have been Sobraliev's wife and sister. The family then erected a high fence around the property and began to receive visitors driving expensive foreign cars and large jeeps. Sobraliev's home soon became a hub of activity with the arrival of a former military-intelligence (GRU) operative. Arman Menkeev, a retired (December 1999) major in the GRU and a specialist, inter alia, in the making of explosives, moved in as a guest in the summerhouse on the property. (Khampash and the women were living in the main house.) The neighbors knew Menkeev as "Roma" and Sobraliev as "Pasha."(20)

Menkeev's background and questions concerning his ultimate loyalties serve to highlight many of the problems connected with analyzing the Dubrovka events. According to an article posted in June of 2003 on the website agentura.ru, Arman Menkeev is "a Russian officer, a major, and a former deputy commander of a [GRU] special-forces detachment." Menkeev, who had been born in 1963 to a Kazakh father and Chechen mother, had previously served as a member of "the famous Chuchkovskaya Brigade of the GRU special forces." During the 18 years in which he was in the GRU, Menkeev had served abroad and was said to speak Farsi. He had also fought with the Russian military during the first Chechen war (1994-96), during which he had received a military decoration for valor, had been wounded, and had "received the classification of an invalid." Menkeev is also reported by agentura.ru to have prepared the "women martyrs' belts," the homemade grenades, and other explosive devices used by the Dubrovka hostage takers in October of 2002.(21) The weapons and explosives employed during October had been "transported to this house [in the village of Chernoe] straight from Chechnya in trucks containing boxes of apples."(22) (Other sources assert that they had been transported by vehicle from Ingushetia, not Chechnya.)

The article in agentura.ru directly raised the question of whether Menkeev was a traitor to Russia who was heeding the "voice of the blood" (of his Chechen mother) or whether he represented, instead, a loyal servant of Russia. The author noted that after Menkeev had been arrested in Chernoe by Russian police on 22 November 2002, FSB officers interrogating him at the Lefortovo Prison in Moscow had come to a decision to classify him as "loyal to the [Russian] government," adding mysteriously, "He knows how to keep a military and state secret."

By the summer of 2002, the terrorist conspiracy had begun to move into high gear. "For a certain time, the rebels tested [Akhyad] Mezhiev. Then, in the summer of 2002, they introduced him to his contact, Aslambek [Khaskhanov], and to the demolition specialist, Yasir,... who arrived specially in Ingushetia from Chechnya to become acquainted with him. Yasir was introduced to the neophyte under the pseudonym of Abubakar." (Both names, we now know, were pseudonyms used by Ruslan Elmurzaev, who was at that time a resident of Moscow and not of Chechnya.) In August 2002, both Khaskhanov and Elmurzaev paid a visit to Mezhiev in Moscow. Responding to adds that he had read in a newspaper, "Mezhiev then purchased two unremarkable vehicles and passed the keys to them -- as well as cell phones he had been instructed to purchase -- to Aslambek, who arrived specially from Nazran [Ingushetia]" to receive them.(23)

The activities of these Chechen terrorists in Moscow had not, it turned out, passed unnoticed. In fact, according to attorney Mikhail Trepashkin, not only were certain of these activities observed but the authorities were informed about them. However, the authorities then chose to take no action. Trepashkin, a former lieutenant colonel in the FSB turned dissident lawyer, was a controversial individual in his own right. In 1998, he had sued then FSB Director Nikolai Kovalev over his dismissal from the service and had participated in a November 1998 press conference together with another former FSB officer, Aleksandr Litvinenko, devoted to the subject of criminal activities occurring within the FSB. In 1999, Trepashkin had begun assisting the Sergei Kovalev commission in its investigation of the 1999 Moscow and Volgodonsk terror bombings.

According to Trepashkin's testimony, Elmurzaev ("Abubakar") and his associates operated in a gray zone where criminal activity routinely intersected with elements of Russian officialdom. In his "Statement" (Spravka), dated 23 March 2003, Trepashkin recalled: "Beginning in May of 2002, from people in the 'criminal world' there came information about a concentration of Chechens in the city of Moscow...such as had not been observed over the past two years."(24) From a retired secret-police officer who was working as a lawyer for several Chechen firms, Trepashkin learned that "Abdul" (a former field commander of Chechen terrorist leader Salman Raduev and of late separatist President Djokhar Dudaev) had appeared in the capital. "I also," Trepashkin continued, "received information on 'Abubakar,' who, for an extensive period of time, had been living in the city of Moscow and had been earning a profit from firms based at the Hotel Salyut in the southwest of Moscow that no one was laying a hand on. Information had come even earlier that the Hotel Salyut was sending part of the funds to support the Chechen rebels. However, no one was carrying out any checking, since the shadowy funds were also being disseminated to several leaders of the [Russian] power structures. The Hotel Salyut was headed by two Chechens,... but their deputy was [retired] Lieutenant General of the USSR KGB Bogantsev. For this reason, no one [among the authorities] was laying a hand on 'Abubakar' in the hotel." Following the Dubrovka incident, Trepashkin voluntarily turned over the information he had collected concerning "Abubakar" to the FSB, but the FSB reacted to this gesture by "trying to fabricate a criminal case against me."

In a later statement, dated 20 July 2003, Trespashkin added: "At the end of July-August 2002,... I received information about a concentration in the city of Moscow of armed Chechen extremists.... They were especially concentrated in the Southwest and Central districts of the city of Moscow." Trepashkin recalled that he had earlier taken "Abdul" into custody in Chechnya in 1995 but that a senior secret police official, Nikolai Patrushev [now head of the FSB], and the then director of the FSK, Mikhail Barsukov, had "ordered me to leave him in peace.(25)

In a conversation with a retired FSB colonel, V.V. Shebalin, Trepashkin " pointed out to him that in Moscow they [Trepashkin's sources] had seen the field commander from the brigade of Raduev 'Abdul'.... I also acquainted him with materials relating to 'Abubakar,' who was serving as a 'roof' for a number of sites in the district of the metro 'Yugo-Zapadnaya.'" "Running ahead," Trepashkin added, "I will say that presently I am being accused of, at the end of July and the beginning of August 2002, providing Shebalin with information concerning agents of the FSB of the Russian Federation." Trepashkin's conclusion: "Either the concentration of extremists took place under the control of the Russian FSB and they therefore decided to turn my citing of such information into the revealing of a state secret of Russia, or Shebalin did not transmit the information to the Russian FSB." But Shebalin, it emerged, had indeed transmitted the information. According to the same July statement by Trepashkin: "He [Shebalin] said that the Russian FSB was aware of the information, but as to why they did not undertake any measures, and why, in relation to me, on the contrary, they opened a criminal case and seized the data base I had been collecting for years, including data about terrorists, he did not know."

Moreover, once Trepashkin learned that "Abubakar" was among the hostage takers at Dubrovka, "I again proposed to Shebalin to call up the materials on my computer which had been seized." But "the experts from the Russian FSB deemed the information I possessed about the events at the 'Nord-Ost' to be a state secret of Russia, and I was charged with having revealed a state secret."

On 22 October 2003, Trepashkin was arrested by the Interior Ministry on a highway in Moscow Oblast and charged with transporting a concealed and unregistered pistol in his car. Trepashkin was able to get out the information that the pistol (supposedly stolen in Chechnya) had been planted in his car and that the regular police had admitted to him that they had acted at the behest of the FSB. Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalev commented concerning this incident: "I do not believe that Mikhail Ivanovich [Trepashkin] had a pistol with him. He is an experienced man, a former officer of the KGB. He is not a bandit, and he is not a fool."(26) On the day preceding his arrest, it might be noted, Trepashkin had granted a major interview to a correspondent for "Moskovskie novosti."(27)

John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

FOOTNOTES

(1) In grani.ru, 6 November 2002. The author would like to thank Robert Otto for his exceptionally generous bibliographical assistance and for his most useful comments on a draft of this essay. Peter Reddaway also made a number of remarkably incisive comments on the manuscript. Lawrence Uzzell, too, provided constructive and helpful criticism. The author is, of course, solely responsible for the final version of this essay.

(2) In sovsekretno.ru, November 2002.

(3) Posted on polit.ru, 8 October 2002, by VTsIOM polling specialist L. A. Sedov.

(4) Yurii Levada, "Reiting voiny," "Novoe vremya," 5 November 2002.

(5) See Yevgenia Borisova, "Kazantsev's Ball Now in Rebels' Court," "The Moscow Times," 20 November 2001. For an informative account by Shchekochikhin of a long conversation he had with Zakaev in Liechtenstein, see Yurii Shchekochikhin, "Zabytaya Chechnya," (Moscow: "Olimp," 2003), pp. 248-259. Zakaev describes, inter alia, details of the peace agreement he had largely come to with retired general Kazantsev.

(6) On this group, see "Chekisty vo vlasti," "Novaya gazeta," 14 July 2003.

(7) Sanobar Shermatova, "Chechen Plan Hammered Out," Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 30 August 2002. The "Khasbulatov plan" appeared as a prefix entitled "Plan mira dlya Chechenskoi respubliki" in Ruslan Khasbulatov, "Vzorvannaya zhizn" (Moscow: "Graal," 2002). The so-called "Brzezinski plan" appeared as: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, and Max Kampelman, "The Way to Chechen Peace," "The Washington Post," 21 June 2002.

(8) In grani.ru, 17 October 2002.

(9) Olga Allenova, "Terrorizm i zakhvat posle antrakta," "Kommersant vlast," 28 October 2002.

(10) Yevgenii Primakov, "Shest punktov po Chechne," "Rossiiskaya gazeta," 10 September 2002.

(11) In grani.ru 17 September 2002.

(12) Sanobar Shermatova, "Mirotvortsy pod kovrom," "Moskovskie novosti," no. 6, 18 February 2003. Subsequently Shermatova reported that the high-level talks had been conducted "in one of the republics of the North Caucasus." ("Shestero iz baraevskikh," "Moskovskie novosti," 29 April 2003). Writing in "Po-amerikanski no poluchaetsya?" in the 5 August 2003 issue of "Moskovskie novosti," Shermatova added: "At the very time when Moscow was accusing Maskhadov of having organized the terrorist act at Dubrovka, he, according to our information, was located in a secure place in one of the republics of the North Caucaus."

(13) hro.org, 19 October 2002.

(14) Olga Allenova, "Terrorizm i zakhvat posle antrakta," "Kommersant vlast," 28 October 2002.

(15) In "The Moscow Times," 31 October 2002.

(16) In grani.ru, 18 October.

(17) Kavkaz-Tsentr, translated by BBC Monitoring, 4 October 2002.

(18) Aleksandr Khinshtein, "Glavnyi terrorist 'Nord-Osta,'" "Moskovskii komsomolets," 23 May 2003; and Zinaida Lobanova, "Tolko on otvetit za 'Nord-Ost'?" "Komsomol'skaya pravda," 22 April 2003.

(19) "V Moskve gotovilos chetyre 'Nord-Osta,'" "Rossiiskaya gazeta," 20 June 2003. Avdyukov was removed from his post in July 2003: "Prokuror Moskvy podal v otstavku," grani.ru, 31 July 2003.

(20) See Khinshtein, "Glavnyi terrorist..."; Andrei Skrobot, "Vzryvy v Moskve gotovyat v Podmoskove," "Nezavisimaya gazeta," 6 June 2003; and Zinaida Lobanova, Andrei Redkin, "Ne vinovny my! Baraev sam prishel," "Komsomolskaya pravda," 23 June 2003.

(21) Aleksandr Zheglov, "Pravitelstvu veren," agentura.ru, 30 June 2003. This article is said by agentura.ru to have first appeared in the newspaper "Den," 3 December 2003.

(22) Zinaida Lobanova et al., "Naiden ment, pustivshii terroristov v 'Nord-Ost,'" "Komsomolskaya pravda," 9 June 2003. An earlier report by Lobanova that appeared in the 22 April 2003 issue of the same newspaper had stated that the weapons and explosives had been transported to the capital from Ingushetia in a truck loaded with watermelons and had then been kept in two rented garages in Moscow, one on Leninskii Prospekt and one on Ogorodnyi Proezd. It appears that the explosives were originally housed at the base in the village of Chernoe.

(23) Zinaida Lobanova, "Tolko on otvetit za 'Nord-Ost'?" "Komsomolskaya pravda," 22 April 2003.

(24) For the text of Trepashkin's "Spravka," see "Tainstvennyi 'Abubakar,'" chechenpress.com, 31 July 2003.

(25) In "Ekho 'Nord-Osta' i vzryvov domov v Rossii," Kavkazkii vestnik (editor@k...), 22 July 2003. The text also appeared in: "'Nord-Ost': provokatsiya FSB," chechenpress.com, 21 July 2003.

(26) In Polina Shershneva, "On poidet do kontsa," newizv.ru, 24 October 2003.

(27) Igor Korolkov, "Fotorobot na pervoi svezhesti," "Moskovskie novosti," 11 November 2003. In the 4 December 2003 issue of "Novaya gazeta," journalist Anna Politkovskaya reported that Trepashkin was being tried in a closed trial conducted by the Moscow District Military Court and that Amnesty International was in process of according him the status of political prisoner.

(Compiled by Roman Kupchinsky)

RFE/RL Organized Crime and Terrorism Watch Vol. 4, No. 1, 8 January 2004

Reporting on Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism in the former USSR, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East

THE OCTOBER 2002 MOSCOW HOSTAGE-TAKING INCIDENT (Part 2)

By John B. Dunlop

THE NOMINAL LEADER OF THE TERRORISTS

A young man who called himself Movsar Baraev served as the titular leader of the group of terrorists that took control of the Moscow theater. Movsar Baraev -- who also went by the names Mansur Salamov and Movsar Suleimenov(28) -- had but a single claim to fame: He was the nephew of the late Chechen Wahhabi kidnapper and murderer Arbi Baraev. According to a report appearing in the military newspaper "Krasnaya zvezda," Arbi Baraev "had personally participated in the murder of 170 persons."(29) Nonetheless, Baraev, Movsar's uncle, "had moved freely about the [Chechen] republic showing at federal checkpoints the documents of an officer of the Russian MVD [Interior Ministry]."(30) "On the windshield of [Arbi] Baraev's vehicle," journalist Anna Politkovskaya has noted, "there was a pass, regularly renewed, which stated that the driver was free 'to go everywhere' -- the most cherished and respected pass in the Combined Group of [Russian] Forces."(31) Arbi Baraev also had reported shadowy ties to both the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Russian Military Intelligence (GRU).(32)

In January 2003, a well-known French journalist, Anne Nivat, author of the book "Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya" (2001), who had conducted a number of incognito visits to Chechnya, reported: "Two months before the hostage taking, the GRU, the secret service of the Russian army, had announced [Movsar] Baraev's arrest. The implication is that he would have been held until his 'arrest' to lead the hostage taking at the Dubrovka theater."(33)

Good reasons exist to doubt that Movsar was the actual leader of the group. "Under his [Movsar Baraev's] control," Sanobar Shermatova has stipulated, "were [only] five to six rebels, and he never demonstrated either the military or organizational abilities necessary for a commander.... The Chechens [sources of "Moskovskie novosti"] say that Baraev himself was not fully initiated into the plan [to seize the theater]. He was supposed to play his role and then burn up like a rocket booster." The former pro-Moscow head of the Chechen Interior Ministry, also a former FSB officer, Said-Selim Peshkhoev "proposed that this group of terrorists was led not by Movsar Baraev but by another person."(34)

Further testimony that Movsar was not the real leader comes from Shamil Basaev. In late April 2003, Basaev recalled: "I included [Movsar] Baraev in this group only in late September [2002]. I had only two hours to talk to him and give instructions."(35) If Movsar Baraev was at this time in the custody of the GRU (as Nivat's sources claim), then Basaev could only have met with Baraev through the good offices of that elite organization. Such a scenario is not unimaginable. It is known that Basaev himself worked closely with a purported GRU officer named Anton Surikov when Basaev was serving as deputy defense minister of the separatist (from Georgia) republic of Abkhazia in 1992-93. During the course of a 2001 interview, Surikov assessed "extremely positively" Basaev's role in that conflict.(36) "In the beginning of the 1990s," Surikov affirmed, "he [Basaev] was materially supported by us."

A number of Russian journalists and political analysts have expressed their belief that Basaev and Surikov met together once again some years later -- this time together with the chief of the Russian presidential administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, at the estate of a Saudi international arms dealer in southern France in July 1999, in order to seal an agreement which led to Basaev's invasion of Daghestan the following month.(37) In the summer of 2000, when the newspaper "Versiya" published an article about the alleged meeting complete with a group photograph of Voloshin, Basaev, and Surikov, the paper approached Surikov and he "rather severely" told its correspondents to leave him alone. However, Surikov did not deny that the meeting took place. Moreover, almost a year later, when asked about the possible role of the security forces in organizing the invasion of Daghestan, Surikov replied somewhat mysteriously: "A positive answer to your question would sound unproven, although, in my view, such a perspective on events in part has a right to existence, but only in part." Among the more prominent individuals who have voiced this perspective was the former secretary of the Russian Security Council, retired General Aleksandr Lebed. He affirmed his belief in October of 1999 that "Basaev and the Kremlin had concluded an agreement," which had led to the August 1999 invasion of Daghestan.(38)

Among the suicide bombers who were present in the Moscow theater, Nivat has also reported, there were two women, who, like Movsar Baraev, had already been placed under arrest by the federal authorities: "At Assinovskaya, a village close to the border with Ingushetia, which is where two of the [Baraev] unit's women came from, their mothers say they had been arrested [by the Russian authorities] and taken to an unknown destination at the end of September [2002]. Secretive in the presence of the outsider that I am, and still considerably shocked, they won't say more."

In a similar vein, in January 2003, the late Duma Deputy and journalist Yurii Shchekochikhin wrote in the newspaper "Novaya Gazeta": "Unexpectedly, last week I learned that one of the female terrorists in the Nord-Ost building was not just anyone but a woman who had been imprisoned for a long time in one of the Russian [penal] colonies. She was recognized on television by her mother, a resident of Shelkovskii Raion in Chechnya. She cannot understand how her daughter reached Moscow as a terrorist from a prison cell."(39)

In addition, the well-connected investigative journalist Aleksandr Khinshtein has reported that some eight of the women suicide bombers were able to take up residence in a former "military city [gorodok]" in Moscow, located on Ilovaiskaya Street, not far from the Dubrovka theater. This complex, which housed a large number of illegal residents prepared to pay bribes to the authorities, was apparently under the protection of corrupt elements among the Moscow police.(40)

THE ACTIVE PHASE OF THE OPERATION BEGINS

By mid-October 2002, the terrorists had shifted over to the active phase of their operation. During a face-to-face meeting with "Abubakar," Aslambek Khaskhanov learned that "Shamil Basaev had ordered him [Abubakar] to prepare 'a very large action' with a seizure of hostages."(41) The action referred to was, of course, the taking of the theater at Dubrovka.

A series of powerful explosions had been set to go off, beginning on 19 October 2002, with the hostage-taking episode itself having originally been planned for 7 November, the former anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Several vehicles were fitted with explosive devices, most likely at the terrorist base at Chernoe in Moscow Oblast, and then moved to a garage at 95 Leninskii Prospekt. "An explosion [at a McDonald's restaurant in southwest Moscow] took place on 19 October, at approximately 1:05 p.m., that is not during rush hour and not in the most crowded area of the city." This account by the former chief procurator of Moscow, Mikhail Avdyukov, continues: "Two other vehicles [fitted with explosives] were also parked: one next to the Tchaikovsky Theater Hall on Triumfalnaya Square, the other near a busy subway transit point in the center. But the more powerful explosives [contained in these two vehicles] did not work."(42) According to one version, the watch mechanism failed to work in the vehicle that had been parked at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.

On 20 October, Aslambek Khaskhanov, who had placed the explosives in the three vehicles, flew from Moscow to Nazran, Ingushetia, using false documents. His decision to leave town has been assessed by one journalist as being due to "banal cowardice." On that same day, his confederate, "Abubakar," according to one report, removed the large bomb from the vehicle at the Tchaikovsky Theater." On 23 October, that bomb was then "placed in the house of culture at Dubrovka."(43)

This powerful bomb placed in the theater, it was later revealed, was in fact incapable of detonating: "The power [ministries] have admitted," "Kommersant" reported in July 2003, "that the most powerful of the homemade bombs which were placed by the Baraevites in the seized theater center at Dubrovka were not in a condition in which they could be detonated. They lacked such important elements as batteries, which made the bombs harmless bolvanki [dummies]. And it was precisely this circumstance that permitted the conducting of a completely successful storm of the theater center."(44)

According to one press report, the powerful bombs placed by Khaskhanov did not go off because of a key design failure. Two of the vehicles that had failed to explode were later located by the Moscow Criminal Investigations Department (MUR) (in January 2003 in a parking lot located off the Zvenigorod Highway), who determined the reason for the failure of the bombs: "The gas tanks of the vehicles were divided hermetically into two parts: in one half was gasoline while the other was filled with a substance similar to plastic explosive together with nails and fragments of steel barbed wire. However, an examination showed that the amount of plastic explosive was so small that even if an explosion had happened, the explosive force would have been insignificant."(45) (As we have seen, other reports mention a faulty timing mechanism in the bombs.)

The explosion of the small bomb contained in the "Tavriya" vehicle that had been parked next to McDonald's restaurant on Porkryshkin Street and had resulted in the death of one person attracted the attention of a unit of MUR, an elite police body designed to combat organized crime and terrorism, commanded by Colonel Yevgenii Taratorin. "The police learned that the 'Tavriya' vehicle that had been blown up had been sold by proxy to a certain Artur Kashinskii...whose real name turned out to be Aslan Murdalov, a native of Urus-Martan in Chechnya, who had been living in Moscow for 10 years."(46) Working quickly, the MUR identified Murdalov and took him into custody on 22 October.

It was the arrest of Murdalov that forced the terrorists "to accelerate their activities and the seizure of the hostages at Dubrovka, which had first been planned for 7 November."(47) As journalist Zinaida Lobanova has noted: "The original seizure of the musical 'Nord-Ost' was planned for 7 November, the day of Accord and Reconciliation [the postcommunist name for the holiday], and that seizure was to have been preceded by the explosion of cars in the center of the capital, in order to sow panic."(48) On 22 October, "A.S. Mezhiev informed Abubakar about the taking into custody of A.M. Murdalov.... [Abubakar] told him that in the next few days a powerful operation would take place."(49)

The failure of the two car bombs to explode in crowded locations in the center of the capital required the terrorists to speed up and to alter their plans. The hostage-taking operation at Dubrovka had been intended (at least, apparently, by certain of its planners) to be the culmination of a terror bombing campaign directly reminiscent of the one visited on the capital in September of 1999. Deprived of this sanguinary "introduction," the October 23 hostage-taking action commenced shorn of its spectacular first act. The MUR had gotten on the trail of the terrorists and their associates sooner than had been expected. (In this sense, the entire episode bears a certain resemblance to the "Ryazan incident" of September 1999, in which the local police interfered with an operation that was under way.[50]). Once the theater had been taken over by the terrorists on 23 October, the officers of the MUR realized that "the terror act at McDonald's and the seizure of the Nord-Ost had been prepared by one and the same people." On 28 October, just two days after the theater had been stormed by Russian special forces units, the MUR took the two Mezhiev brothers into custody.(51)

To return to 23 October -- the day on which the Moscow theater was seized by the terrorists -- shortly before the raid occurred: "Abubakar designated a meeting with [Akhyad] Mezhiev near the Crystal Casino. Abubakar was at the wheel of a Ford Transit [minibus]. He handed over to Mezhiev two Chechen girls on whom suicide belts with explosives had been attached. Abubakar ordered that the girls be taken to a populated place where they could blow themselves up and thus draw the attention of the law-enforcement organs away from the seizure of the House of Culture [at Dubrovka]."(52) "At first," the account continues, "Mezhiev decided to let the suicide women off at the Pyramid Cafe, but, having learned by radio of the seizure of the House of Culture, he exhibited cowardice."

A bomb blast at this normally crowded cafe located in the very center of Moscow would have been a catastrophic event. In his taped confession to the police, Akhyad Mezhiev related that, on the night of 23-24 October, Abubakar called him on his mobile phone and demanded angrily: "Why has there been no wedding?" Wedding was "the code word for the designated stage of the terrorist act. Women-bombs was what they had in mind." "Abubakar wanted me," Mezhiev continued, "to send the girls that same night. They had everything ready. Everything depended on me." Mezhiev drove the suicide bombers to the Pyramid Cafe on Pushkin Square. "Here there were always a lot of people. The 'brides of Allah' were to blow themselves up in the crowd." Mezhiev, however, "did not let the women out of the vehicle. Why? We don't know."(53)

Mezhiev then relates (on the police videotape) how he took the belts away from the would-be suicide bombers and then drove them to a train station where he bought them tickets to Nazran, Ingushetia, and bade them farewell. He then gave the "martyrs' belts" to his brother Alikhan, who, at the command of Abubakar, handed them over to Khampash Sobraliev, one of the two terrorists based in the village of Chernoe in Moscow Oblast.(54) "In a telephone conversation with Abubakar, he [Mezhiev] said that he was afraid and wanted to leave town." This he proved unable to do, and on 28 October he was placed under arrest by the MUR. "He was 'caught out' because of his telephone conversations with Abubakar."(55)

An alternative explanation to the version Mezhiev recounted to the police would be that the women terrorists in fact had been let out of the vehicle but their "martyr-belts" had failed to detonate. Shamil Basaev seemed to allude to such a development in his already-cited statement posted on Kavkaz Tsentr on 26 April 2003: "The detonators of our martyrs had not worked: this occurred with those who were inside [the theater at Dubrovka] and four female martyrs who were outside. They returned here. I personally talked to three and they claimed that their detonators had not worked."(56) It is entirely possible, however, that Basaev was aware that the belts would not work and was merely embellishing his tale for the sake of potential donors in the Gulf states and the Muslim world.

"According to the information of the FSB," the newspaper "Kommersant" reported on 29 October, "the entire building [at Dubrovka] was mined, and the explosion of only a part of the bombs could have brought about the collapse of the theater building. But only a pair of the bombs that were contained in the belts of women-kamikaze exploded. At the moment of the explosion, they [the women] were outside the hall guarding the approach to it. It turns out that all the other bombs were either fakes or they had not been readied for use. For example, they lacked batteries or a detonator."(57)

One of the Russian emergency workers who entered the building after it was stormed by the special forces, Yurii Pugachev, has recalled: "Personally I saw the bodies of several women in black clothing whose stomachs had literally been blown apart. Evidently the explosive was not very strong."(58) "If one is to believe the sources of 'Moskovskie novosti,'" Sanobar Shermatova and Aleksandr Teit wrote in an article appearing in April 2003, "several of the women suicide fighters, having understood that gas had been let into the hall, tried to connect the lead wires on their suicide belts. They didn't work, because, instead of explosives, there was a fake there. Was that really the way it really was?"(59)

Shamil Basaev has claimed that the original targets of the terrorists were the buildings of the Russian State Duma and the Federation Council. In an article appearing in an underground rebel newspaper, "Ichkeriya," Basaev even "provides the measurements of the vestibules of the two buildings."(60) Since, however, Basaev is a habitual distorter of the truth, one must at this point must remain agnostic about what precise building(s) the terrorists intended to target first.

The Russian authorities, it has also been reported, had been forewarned of the impending terrorist attack by none other than the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to Duma Deputy Yurii Shchekochikhin, he was telephoned on 25 October 2002 by "a high-ranking individual in Washington," who told him that, during the first half of October, the CIA had alerted the Russian government that "a new Budennovsk [a reference to the southern Russian town attacked in June of 1995 by a force headed by Shamil Basaev] was being prepared in Moscow."(61)

In April 2003, there occurred a brief flap when a dissident former FSB officer, Aleksandr Litvinenko, living in London, and a leading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, reported that an FSB agent of Chechen nationality, Khampash Terkibaev, had been present inside the theater building but had left it before the storming of 26 October.(62) Politkovskaya went on to publish the text of an interview with Terkibaev in which he confirmed that he had indeed been in the building. It emerged, however, that both Litvinenko and Politkovskaya had fallen into an extremely intricate and clever trap, evidently laid by for them by the FSB. Terkibaev, a murky adventurer with almost certain links to the secret police, had boasted during a visit to Baku that he had been in the building at Dubrovka, but he had evidently been lying. Sanobar Shermatova and a co-author pointed out on the pages of "Moskovskie novosti" that Terkibaev, "who in 2000 even found a way to receive a document of amnesty in the FSB office in the city of Argun," had for a number of years been engaging in anti-Wahhabi activities and would not therefore have been acceptable to the Movsar Baraev/Abubakar group. "Terkibaev," they noted, "does not deny that after the events around 'Nord-Ost,' he introduced himself in Baku as a participant in the seizure of the hostages."(63)

Another Chechen, Zaurbek Talikhigov, was arrested by the police following the storming of the theater building. He was apparently a walk-on volunteer who, using a borrowed cell phone, attempted to inform the terrorists from outside the building where the Russian forces were positioned. His phone conversations were, of course, monitored and taped by Russian law-enforcement authorities.(64)

THE TERRORIST ASSAULT ON 23 OCTOBER

On 23 October, shortly after 9:00 p.m., 40 Chechen terrorists whose titular leader was Movsar Baraev -- but whose de facto leader was the shadowy "Abubakar" (Ruslan Elmurzaev) -- stormed (there were no armed guards present so the task was not overly difficult) and took control of the House of Culture at Dubrovka in Moscow, which was putting on the popular musical "Nord-Ost." A total of 979 people were taken captive (there were slightly more than 900 present in the building at the time that it was taken back on 26 October).(65) According to a statement made by the former procurator of Moscow, the terrorists were carrying 17 automatic weapons and 20 pistols, as well as various homemade bombs, suicide belts, and grenades.(66) Twenty-one of the terrorists were men and 19 women.(67) As opposed to the "terror bombings" in Moscow in 1999 -- when the announced suspects had been ethnic Karachai -- on this occasion there could be little doubt that the perpetrators were ethnic Chechens, though elements among the hostage takers, with the likely support of the special services involved in the operation, sought to convey the impression that there were Arab terrorists among them.

One website, utro.ru, which on occasion elects to convey the views of the Russian secret services, focused attention upon one of the terrorists, the mysterious "Yasir" (another name, as we have seen, used by "Abubakar"): "As 'Utro' has learned from sources in the Russian special services," the website wrote, "there were several rebels who were non-Chechens, including an Arab called (his code-name) Yasir. About him the following is known: this international terrorist is a subject of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and is on the international wanted list. Yasir entered into the leading link of the cells of 'Al-Qaeda'.... The Wahhabi Movsar Baraev...was in fact a marionette in the hands of experienced puppeteers."(68) When a deputy minister of the interior, Vladimir Vasilev, was asked by RTR television on 26 October: "Abubakar is an Arabic name, isn't it?" he replied misleadingly: "Naturally, it is."(69) Even one year after the Dubrovka episode, some Russian security officials were continuing to push the fictional "Yasir's" involvement in the hostage-taking events: "The investigation," gzt.ru reported on 23 October 2003, "has not yet established the identity of a mercenary, an Arab who called himself Yasir. He was using a Russian Federation [internal] passport in the name of Alkhazurov, Idris Makhmudovich, born 1974."(70) One day after the publishing of this information, however, the newspaper "Izvestiya" reported that it had been the titular leader of the terrorists, Movsar Baraev, who in fact had been carrying "a passport in the name of Idris Alkhazurov."(71)

On 24 October 2002, the day following the seizure of the theater at Dubrovka, it was reported by the media that President Vladimir Putin "sees the seizure of the hostages in Moscow as one of the links in a chain of the manifestations of international terrorism, in one row with the [recent] terrorist acts in Indonesia and the Philippines. 'These same people also planned the terrorist act in Moscow,' said Putin."(72)

These "Arab" and "radical Islamic" themes were also heavily accented by the hostage takers themselves. At 10:00 p.m. on 23 October, just 50 minutes after the taking of the building: "The [former] minister of propaganda of the Ichkerian republic [i.e., Chechnya], Movladi Udugov, speaks to the BBC Service of Central Asia and the Caucasus. He confirms that the group of field commander [Movsar] Baraev organized the hostage taking. According to Udugov, the group consists of kamikaze terrorists and about 40 [sic] widows of Chechen rebels who are not going to surrender. The building is mined."(73) Udugov was at the time widely believed to be living in Qatar or another of the Gulf states. Two hours later, a website associated with Udugov, Kavkaz-Tsentr (kavkaz.org), reported the same information, adding: "The terrorists are demanding the withdrawal of [Russian] troops from Chechnya."(74)

The following day, 24 October, it was reported by the website gazeta.ru, as well as by other media, that: "The Qatar television company Al-Jazeera broadcast a tape of the Chechen rebels in which they state that they are prepared to die for the independence of their homeland and to deprive of life the hostages located in the building in the theater center." "For us," the hostage takers affirmed on the tape, "it is a matter if indifference where we die." "We have chosen to die here, in Moscow, and we will take with us the souls of the unfaithful," added one of the five women in masks standing in the frame under the sign, 'Allah akbar!' written in Arabic." In another fragment, one of the rebels is shown declaring, "Each of us is prepared for self-sacrifice, for the sake of Allah and the independence of Chechnya."(75) The veiled women were shown dressed entirely in black. Al-Jazeera television also showed one of the male rebels "seated in front of a laptop with the holy Muslim book the Koran by his side." "We seek death more than you seek life," said the man, who was also dressed in black. "We came to the Russian capital to stop the war or die for the sake of Allah," he asserted.(76) Al Jazeera reported subsequently that the interview had been taped on 23 October in Moscow shortly before the Chechens had assaulted the theater.(77)

The rebels also exhibited a militant radical Muslim stance over the course of the few interviews that they granted to Russian and Western media. As NTV correspondent Sergei Dedukh reported on 25 October (the footage was shown the following day): "The two girls in black whom the rebels called their sisters have explosives on their belts with wires sticking out of them. Could you please tell us what your clothes and the explosives in your belt mean?" An unidentified woman hostage taker replied: "They mean that we shall not stop at anything or anywhere. We are on Allah's way. If we die here, that won't be the end of it. There are many of us, and it will go on."(78) Movsar Baraev is then quoted by Dedukh as asserting that "the terrorists' only and final goal is the end of the military operation in Chechnya and the withdrawal of [Russian] federal troops."

In an interview with journalist Mark Franchetti of London's "The Sunday Times," Abubakar is quoted as saying: "We are a suicide group. Here we have bombs and rockets and mines. Our women suicide bombers have their fingers on the detonator at all times. Time is running out.... Let the Russians just try to storm the building. That's all we are waiting for. We cherish death more than you do life." When he was finally allowed to interview Baraev, Franchetti witnessed this scene: "Baraev and his men paraded three Chechen women dressed in black with headscarves covering all but their eyes. In one hand each held a pistol, in the other a detonator linked to a short wire attached to 5 kilograms of explosive strapped to her stomach. Except for a beam of light from inside the auditorium, the foyer was dark. One of Baraev's men used a torch to show off the explosives belts. 'They work in shifts,' explained Baraev. 'Those on duty have their finger on the detonator at all times. One push of the button and they will explode. The auditorium is mined, all wired up with heavy explosives. Just let the Russians try to break in and the whole place will explode.'"(79) (These statements, as we have seen, were an apparent bluff by the terrorist leaders -- the explosives were not in reality in a condition in which they could be detonated.)

Putin and his team, manifestly, now had an 11 September 2001 of their own, though it remains unclear whether or not they had been surprised by this development. Signs in Arabic, the brandishing of the Koran, veiled women suicide bombers dressed all in black -- what more could the Russian leadership need? Moreover, as distinct from 1999, the terrorists on this occasion were unquestionably Chechens, except, perhaps, for a sprinkling of Arabs such as the fictional "Yasir." The seizing of the theater building, it was heavy-handedly suggested, constituted a link in a chain leading back to the infamous Al-Qaeda.

BLACKENING MASKHADOV

In addition to seeking to depict the hostage-taking incident as a second 9/11, a second aim behind the regime's response to the crisis appeared to be to fully discredit Aslan Maskhadov, and thus render the possibility of negotiations with him or other moderate Chechen separatists unthinkable. Early on the morning of 25 October, the website newsru.com (affiliated with NTV) reported: "There has come information that the order to seize the hostages was given by Aslan Maskhadov. One of the Chechen terrorists stated this. A tape of [Maskhadov's] declaration was shown by the channel Al-Jazeera. In it Maskhadov says, 'In the very near future, we will conduct an operation which will overturn the history of the Chechen war.'"(80)

This statement by Maskhadov was cited later on the same day by official spokesmen for both the FSB and the Interior Ministry as self-evident proof of his responsibility for the raid. On 31 October, Putin spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembskii emphasized at a news conference that there could be no question of holding future talks with Maskhadov. "Maskhadov can no longer be considered a legitimate representative of this resistance," Yastrzhembskii told reporters. "We have to wipe out the commanders of the movement," including Maskhadov, he stressed.(81)

This aggressive campaign by the Russian leadership seems to have borne significant diplomatic fruit. On 30 October, the "Los Angeles Times" reported that "a senior U.S. official" in Moscow had termed Maskhadov "damaged goods" with links to terrorism. The senior official went on to assert that "the Chechen leader should be excluded from peace talks."(82) In more judicious fashion, one influential Russian democrat and parliamentary faction leader, Grigorii Yavlinskii, confided on 27 October "his view of Maskhadov has changed. If Maskhadov commanded the rebels in the theater, he said, he could never participate in a political settlement."(83)

But how strong was the evidence linking Maskhadov to the terrorist action? Journalist Mikhail Falkov looked into the issue of the tape of Maskhadov's statement that had been shown over Al-Jazeera and learned that: "Russian television viewers had been presented only with a fragment of the original tape. On the tape it was distinctly evident that the filming had been conducted not in October but toward the end of the summer." This discovery appeared to back up the claim of Maskhadov's official spokesman in Europe, Akhmed Zakaev, that "the question [in Maskhadov's taped statement] concerned not the seizure of hostages but a military operation against federal forces."(84) It should also be noted that, on 24 October, the day following the hostage taking at Dubrovka, Zakaev had written to Lord Judd of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and unambiguously declared: "The Chechen leadership headed by President A. Maskhadov decisively condemns all actions against the civilian population. We don't accept the terrorist method for the solution of any kind of problems.... We call on both sides, both the armed people in the theater and the government of Russia, to find an un-bloody exit from this difficult situation."(85)

In an article appearing in "Moskovskie novosti," journalists Shermatova and Teit reported that a careful analysis of a hushed conversation that had been conducted in Chechen between Abubakar and Movsar Baraev and had been accidentally captured by NTV on 25 October showed the following: "Here is Movsar Baraev answering the questions of NTV correspondents before a television camera. Next to him stands a rebel, known as Abubakar: he in an undertone in Chechen corrects Movsar. When Baraev declares that they had been sent by Shamil Basaev, Abubakar quietly suggests, 'Pacha ch'ogo al,' 'point to the president.' After that, Movsar obediently adds: 'Aslan Maskhadov.'"(86) Abubakar thus sought publicly to tie Maskhadov directly to the hostage-taking incident.

That Abubakar and not Movsar Baraev was the de facto leader of the terrorists also becomes clear from Franchetti's report: "At one point he [Baraev] lowered his guard. Perhaps succumbing to the lure of fame, he offered to let me film the hostages in the auditorium. His right-hand man [Abubakar] fiercely disagreed.... They briefly left the storage room to confer in the dark foyer.... Baraev came back. There would be no more filming."(87) Abubakar had prevailed over Baraev in a test of wills.

It seems that Abubakar may also in a subtle way have been involved in helping the federal forces to prepare the storming of the theater. "Several sources in the special services," the newspaper "Moskovskii komsomolets" reported on 28 October, "have informed us that in the juice which the negotiators took to the hostages, without their knowledge, there was admixed a substance which was to soften the toxic action of the gas."(88) Abubakar himself raised this topic. Summing up one of her discussion/negotiations with Abubakar, journalist Politkovskaya has recalled: "We agree that I will start bringing water into the building. Bakar suddenly throws in, on his own initiative, 'And you can bring juice.' I ask him if I can also bring food for the children being held inside, but he refuses."(89)

A leading journalist writing on the pages of "Moskovskie novosti," Valerii Vyzhutovich, looked into the issue of Maskhadov's supposed responsibility for the raid and concluded: "There are no direct proofs convicting Maskhadov of the preparation of the terrorist act in Moscow." He added that "not a single court, not even ours, the most humane and just," would uphold the admissibility in a trial of the edited and highly selective footage shown over Al-Jazeera television -- "a propagandistic soporific" -- in Vyzhutovich's words.(90)

When Politkovskaya, in a one-on-one private conversation with Abubakar, directly asked him, "Do you submit to Maskhadov?" he replied, "Yes, Maskhadov is our president, but we are making war by ourselves." "But you are aware," she pressed him, "that Ilyas Akhmadov [a separatist spokesman loyal to Maskhadov] is conducting peace negotiations in America and Akhmed Zakaev in Europe, and that they are representatives of Maskhadov. Perhaps you would like to be connected with them right now? Or let me dial them for you." "What is this about?" Abubakar retorted angrily. "They don't suit us. They are conducting those negotiations slowly...while we are dying in the forests. We are sick of them."(91) Abubakar's feelings concerning Maskhadov and other Chechen separatist moderates are revealed in these words.

The regime, for its part, seems to have concluded that it now possessed ample, indeed overwhelming, evidence to prove to both Russian citizens and to Western leaders two key points: first, that the hostage takers were dangerous and repugnant international terrorists in the Al-Qaeda mold; and, second, that the leader of the separatist Chechens, Aslan Maskhadov, had been irretrievably discredited by the raid, rendering the possibility of any future negotiations with him unthinkable.

John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

FOOTNOTES

(28) Vadim Rechkalov, "Vdovii bunt," izvestia.ru, 25 October 2002; and Zinaida Lobanova, "Tolko on otvetit za Nord-Ost," "Komsomolskaya pravda," 22 April 2003. See also "Passport terrorista," izvestia.ru, 24 October 2003.      

(29) In "Krasnaya zvezda," 26 June 2001.      

(30) Sanobar Shermatova, "Glavnyi rabototorgovets," "Moskovskie novosti," 29 October 2002.      

(31) In "Novaya gazeta," 28 June 2001.      

(32) Sanobar Shermatova, "Tainaya voina spetssluzhb," "Moskovskie novosti," 8 August 2000.      

(33) Anne Nivat, "Chechnya: Brutality and Indifference," crimesofwar.org, 6 January 2003.      

(34) Sanobar Shermatova, "Glavnyi rabototorgovets," "Moskovskie novosti," 29 October 2002.      

(35) Kavkaz-Tsentr News Agency, 26 April 2003.      

(36) "Tainyi sovetnik VPK," "Zavtra," 1 June 2001. At the time of this interview, Surikov was serving as head of the State Duma's Department on Industry. On Surikov, see also: Maksim Kalashnikov, "Chelovek, kotoryi verboval Basaeva," stringer-news.ru, 10 July 2002.      

(37) See Petr Pryanshnikov, "Voloshin i Basaev na lazurnom beregu: foto na pamyat," "Versiya," 4 July 2000. This article can be found at: http:www.compromat.ru/main/voloshin/basaev.htm. See also: Andrei Batumskii, "Sgovor," "Versiya," 3 August 1999.      

(38) "Doslovno," "Novaya gazeta," No. 37, 4-10 October 1999, p. 3. Lebed''s statement originally appeared in the French newspaper "Le Figaro" on 29 September 1999.      

(39) Yurii Shchekochikhin, "Nezamechennye novosti nedeli kotorye menya udivili," "Novaya gazeta," No. 4, 20 January 2003.      

(40) Aleksandr Khinshtein, "Chernye vdovy pod 'kryshei' Petrovki," "Moskovskii komsomolets," 23 July 2003.      

(41) Statement of Moscow's chief procurator Mikhail Avdyukov in "V Moskve gotovilos chetyre 'Nord-Osta,'" "Rossiiskaya gazeta," 20 June 2003.      

(42) "V Moskve gotovilos..."      

(43) Khinshtein, "Glavnyi terrorist..."      

(44) Otdel prestupnosti, "U terroristov problemy so vzryvchatkoi," "Kommersant," 7 July 2003. The same claim is made in Sergei Topol, Aleksandr Zheglov, Olga Allenova, "Antrakt posle terakta," "Kommersant," 23 October 2003.      

(45) "U terroristov...," "Kommersant," 7 July 2003.      

(46) Khinshtein, "Glavnyi terrorist..." Khinshtein's source for this information was officers of the MUR.      

(47) Statement of Colonel Taratorin over Russian central television: Leonid Berres, "MUR opravdalsya za 'Nord-Ost,'" izvestia.ru, 7 February 2003.      

(48) Zinaida Lobanova, "Tolko on otvetit..."      

(49) Khinshtein, "Glavnyi terrorist..."      

(50) On this episode, see Chapter 5, "Proval FSB v Ryazani," in Aleksandr Litvinenko, Yurii Feltshtinskii, "FSB vzryvaet Rossiyu" (Internet Edition, 2002). English translation: "Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within" (New York: S.P.I. Books, 2002), pp. 62-104. See also Aleksandr Litvinenko, "Ryazanskii sled," Chapter 10 in his "LPG (Lubyanskaya prestupnaya gruppirovka)" (Internet Edition, 2003).      

(51) Khinshtein, "Glavnyi terrorist..."      

(52) Ibid. Khinshtein identified Abubakar as being Ruslan Elmurzaev, 30 years old, a native of Urus-Martan in Chechnya, and a former Russian police employee. Subsequently the procurator of Moscow confirmed most of this information, noting also that Elmurzaev's patronymic is Abu-Khasanovich: "V Moskve gotovilos..."      

(53) Zinaida Lobanova, "Tolko on otvetit..."      

(54) Ibid.      

(55) Ibid.      

(56) Kavkaz Tsentr News Agency, 26 April 2003.      

(57) Sergei Dyupin, Aleksei Gerasimov, Leonid Berres, "Zakhvat zalozhnikov v Moskve," "Kommersant," 29 October 2002.

(58) Sergei Dyupin, "Peredozirovka," "Kommersant," 28 October 2002.      

(59) Sanobar Shermatova, Aleksandr Teit, "Shestero iz baraevskikh," "Moskovskie novosti," 29 April 2003.      

(60) Sanobar Shermatova, "'Nord-Ost' ne planirovalsya?" "Moskovskie novosti," 24 June 2003.      

(61) Yurii Shchekochikhin, "TsRU predupredilo," "Novaya gazeta," 28 October 2002.      

(62) See "Litvinenko: Yushenkova ubili za rassledovanie terakta v 'Nord-Oste,'" lenta.ru, 25 April 2003; and Anna Politkovskaya, "Odin iz grupppy terroristov utselil. My ego nashli," "Novaya gazeta," 28 April 2003.      

(63) Sanobar Shermatova, Aleksandr Teit, "Antivakhkhabitskii emissar," "Moskvovskie novosti," 13 May 2003. Terkibaev was killed on 15 December 2003 in an automobile crash that some commentators found to be suspicious. "The double agent Terkibaev was removed as a dangerous witness," the website newsru.com observed on 16 December 2003.      

(64) "Posobnik terroristov ne uspel spasti zalozhnikov," "Kommersant," 11 June 2003.      

(65) grani.ru, 28 November 2002. The website provided a list of the names of 979 individuals taken captive on 23 October. As of 25 October, 58 of the captives had been released. ("The Moscow Times," 26 October 2002).      

(66) "V Moskve gotovilos chetyre 'Nord-Osta,'" "Rossiiiskaya gazeta," 20 June 2003. A 41st terrorist, the procurator noted, turned out to be an ethnic Russian, the father of one of the hostages, who had foolishly entered the theater on 25 October and had then been shot by the terrorists.      

(67) "Genprokuratura ustanovila imena 33-kh terroristov, zakhvativshikh zalozhnikov v Moskve," newsru.com, 6 November 2002. Seven remained unidentified as of October 2003.      

(68) Oleg Petrovksii, "V bande Baraeva byl terrorist iz 'Al-Kaedy,'" utro.ru, 30 October 2002.      

(69) "Moskva, zalozhniki," vesti7.ru, 2 November 2002. This program was broadcast on 26 October.      

(70) "Polnyi spisok opoznannykh terroristov," gzt.ru, 23 October 2003.      

(71) Vladimir Demchenko, "Passport terrorista," izvestia.ru, 24 October 2003.      

(72) In newsru.com, 24 October 2002.       (73) gzt.ru, 25 October 2002. Item posted in English.      

(74) newsru.com, 24 October 2002. The item was reported at 00:04 a.m. on 24 October.      

(75) In gazeta.ru, 24 October 2002.      

(76) "Jazeera Shows Taped Chechen Rebel Statements," Reuters, 24 October 2002.      

(77) Associated Press, 26 October 2002.      

(78) "Russian NTV Shows Previously Filmed Interview with Hostage Takers' Leader," BBC Monitoring Service, 26 October 2002.      

(79) Mark Franchetti, "Dream of Martyrdom," "The Sunday Times," 27 October 2002.      

(80) In newsru.com, 27 October.      

(81) "Russia Seeks to 'Wipe Out' Chechen Leaders," Reuters, 31 October 2002.      

(82) Robyn Dixon and David Holley, "U.S. Rejects Chechen Separatist Chief," "Los Angeles Times," 30 October 2002.

(83) Sharon LaFraniere, "Setback Seen for Rebel Cause," "The Washington Post," 28 October 2002.      

(84) Mikhail Falkov, "Kto i gde gotovil moskovskii terakt?" utro.ru, 31 October 2002.      

(85) "Chechen Press Release on Moscow Hostage Crisis," chechenpress.com, 24 October 2002.      

(86) Sanobar Shermatova, Aleksandr Teit, "Shestero iz baraevskikh," "Moskovskie novosti," 29 April 2003. The transcript reads: "[Movsar Baraev]: 'We are acting on orders from the supreme military emir. Our supreme military emir there is Shamil Basaev. You know him very well. And Maskhadov is our president.'" ("Russian NTV shows...," BBC Monitoring Service, 26 October 2002.      

(87) Mark Franchetti, "Dream of Martyrdom," "The Sunday Times," 27 October 2002.      

(88) "Gibel zalozhnikov -- rezultat oshibki spetsluzhb?" "Moskovskii komsomolets," 28 October 2002.      

(89) Anna Politkovskaya, "My Hours Inside the Moscow Theater," Institute for War and Peace Reporting, No. 153, 31 October 2002.      

(90) Valerii Vyzhutovich, "Usyplayuyushchii gaz," "Moskovskie novosti," 29 October 2002.      

(91) Anna Politkovskaya, "Tsena razgovorov," "Novaya Gazeta," No. 80, 28 October 2002.

(Compiled by Roman Kupchinsky)

Copyright (c) 2004. RFE/RL, Inc. All rights reserved.

RFE/RL Organized Crime and Terrorism Watch Vol. 4, No. 2, 15 January 2004

Reporting on Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism in the former USSR, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East

THE OCTOBER 2002 MOSCOW HOSTAGE-TAKING INCIDENT (Part 3)

By John B. Dunlop

Negotiations Leading Nowhere

The failure of three of the four bombs to detonate confronted both the terrorists and the Russian authorities with an exceedingly slippery situation. How was the crisis to be resolved? Abubakar reluctantly consented to conducting a series of negotiations with various Duma deputies, journalists, and at least one doctor, while the Russian power ministries for their part set about practicing a raid on the theater building. Duma deputies who, at great personal risk, visited the building in order to negotiate with the terrorists were: Yabloko faction leader Grigorii Yavlinskii; Aslambek Aslakhanov, the parliamentary deputy representing Chechnya; Irina Khadamada; Iosif Kobzon; and Vyacheslav Igrunov. (Another Duma faction leader, Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Rightist Forces, negotiated with the terrorists by telephone.) Also visiting the building were former Russian Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov and the former president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev. A key role was, as we have seen, played in the negotiations by journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Doctor Leonid Roshal, who treated the hostages, and Sergei Govorukhin, the son of a famous Russian filmmaker and himself a Chechen war veteran, also attempted to facilitate the negotiations.(92)

Yavlinskii's experience with the negotiations has been summarized thus: "The hostage takers were said to have asked specifically for Yavlinskii.... He said he met with the hostage takers for an hour and a half on the night of 24 October. They said they wanted an end to the war in Chechnya and the withdrawal of federal troops, but Yavlinskii said when he tried to get them to formulate their demands, they were unable to come up with any kind of a coherent negotiating position. 'Let's go step by step. You want a cease-fire, OK, let's go for a cease-fire,' Yavlinskii said he told the hostage takers. 'Tell me which regions to pull troops out of. Tell me something I can use.'"(93)

"I insisted," Nemtsov confided to "Nezavisimaya gazeta," "that we had maximally to move the negotiation process forward with a single goal -- to free the children and women. And my logic -- about which both Patrushev and Voloshin knew -- and I stated it also to Abubakar, the politruk [political officer] of the terrorists responsible for the negotiations, was the following: for each peaceful day in Chechnya they would release hostages. One peaceful day -- the children; another one -- the women, and so on. The rebels liked that idea. And the day before yesterday was indeed a peaceful day. But when I reminded Abubakar about our agreements, he sent me to the devil and said that one should talk with either Basaev or Maskhadov."(94)

"There are five requests," Politkovskaya has recalled, "on my list. Food for the hostages, personal hygiene for the women, water and blankets. Jumping ahead a little, we will only manage to agree on water and juice.... I begin to ask what they want, but, in political terms, Bakar isn't on firm ground. He's 'just a soldier' and nothing more. He explains what it all means to him, at length and precisely, and four points can be identified from what he says. First, [President Vladimir] Putin should 'give the word' and declare the end of the war. Secondly, in the course of a day, he should demonstrate that his words aren't empty by, for example, taking the armed forces out of one region.... Then I ask, 'Whom do you trust? Whose word on the withdrawal of the armed forces would you believe?' It turns out that it's (Council of Europe rapporteur) Lord Judd. And we return to their third point. It's very simple -- if the first two points are met, the hostages will be released. And as for the extremists themselves? 'We'll stay to fight. We'll die in battle.'"(95)

While letting volunteer negotiators such as Politkovskaya buy some time, the regime limited itself to delivering only a few public messages to the terrorists. On 25 October, the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Nikolai Patrushev, "declared that the terrorists would be guaranteed their lives if the hostages...were released. He made this declaration after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin." Also on 25 October, at 8:30 in the evening, "the chair of the Federation Council, Sergei Mironov, addressed the hostages and terrorists on direct open air on a radio program of Ekho Moskvy. Addressing the terrorists, he [Mironov] declared: 'Advance your real conditions, free our people, and you will be ensured safety and security to leave the boundaries of Russia. You have de facto already achieved your goal of attracting attention. The entire world is talking about it.'"(96) Presented one day before the launching of the storm, these statements appear to have been another attempt to buy time.

      Late in the evening of that same day, 25 October, the regime offered to begin serious negotiations on the following day (26 October), with retired General Viktor Kazantsev, Putin's official representative in the Southern Federal District, meeting with the hostage takers. This gesture came at a time when preparations for the storm were moving ahead full tilt. The rebels, for their part, reacted positively to this development, "announcing to the hostages that they had 'good news.'... Tomorrow [Saturday, 26 October] at 10:00 a.m., Kazantsev will come. Everything will be normal. They have come to an agreement. This suits us. Behave peacefully. We are not beasts. We will not kill you if you sit quietly and peacefully.'"(97) Political and security affairs correspondent Pavel Felgenhauer has reported that Kazantsev made no preparations to actually fly from southern Russia to Moscow.(98)

According to Duma faction leader Yavlinskii, he came to understand "by 5 p.m. on 25 October" that Putin had adopted an irrevocable decision to storm the building.(99) The gazeta.ru website has reported that, "The first information that a decision concerning a storm had been taken and that it had been set for the morning of 26 October was gained by journalists working in the area of the theater center at about 11:00 p.m. on 25 October."(100) Felgenhauer observed over Ekho Moskvy radio on 26 October: "Our forces...stormed the 'Nord-Ost' building after two days of preparations, without even so much as a prior attempt to negotiate with the captors in any meaningful way to secure a peaceful solution to the affair.... This week, first there was reconnaissance. By every conceivable means of electronic and acoustic surveillance, the terrorists' exchanges and movements were monitored. On Friday [25 October], the plans were reported to Vladimir Putin, who gave the go-ahead for the operation to start on Saturday."(101)

A member of the special forces units which took the building provided support for Felgenhauer's interpretation in remarks made to gzt.ru: "We put bugs everywhere, even in the concert hall. We accompanied every negotiator; in the beginning we did it openly, but then the Chechens became indignant.... When the journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, made the agreement with them to deliver water, food, and medicine, headquarters had already prepared everything.... Everybody knew about the storm. Only nobody knew when it would happen."(102)

      It was the special forces and not the terrorists who appear to have precipitated the final denouement. "At 5:20 a.m. [on 26 October]," journalist Valerii Yakov has written, "the operation suffered its first setback. The terrorists noticed in the building a movement of a group of 'Alfa' [special forces] and opened fire. They were instantly destroyed, but it was necessary immediately to correct the plan [of attack].... At this time, a representative of the FSB, Pavel Kudryavtsev, came out to the journalists and reported that the terrorists had shot two men and that another man and a woman had been wounded. Later it emerged that this information was false."(103) The above-cited correspondent Felgenhauer has, for his part, commented: "There are no serious grounds for these heroic fairy tales [about an execution of the hostages by the terrorists] to be believed. Long before the building was stormed, it had become obvious in many ways that everything would be decided precisely on Saturday morning."(104) The producer of the Nord-Ost musical, Georgii Vasilev, who was the de facto leader and chief spokesman for the hostages, declared: "I have heard that they began the storm supposedly because they [the terrorists] began to execute the hostages. That is the official point of view of the authorities. I want to say that there were no executions -- only threats."(105)

As is well known, a decision was taken by the Russian authorities to employ a powerful gas in the retaking of the building. As one military affairs specialist, Viktor Baranets, has reported, "The idea of using gas during the operation to liberate the hostages was in the heads of many members of the operational headquarters already during the second day of the emergency situation when it became clear that they would hardly come to agreement with the terrorists.... It was decided to use the most powerful poison [available] -- a psycho-chemical gas (PChG). According to some sources, it has the name 'Kolokol [i.e., Bell]-1.'"(106) What was in this gas? "We are never going to know exactly what chemical it was," Lev Fedorov, an environmental activist who is the head of the Russian Union for Chemical Safety, has aptly commented, "because in this country the state is more important than the people."(107)

According to the website gazeta.ru, the special forces began pumping gas into the hall through the ventilation system at 4:30 a.m., "a half an hour before the storm."(108) Other sources contend, however, that it may have been significantly earlier, perhaps shortly after 1:00 a.m.(109) One possibility is that a decision was taken to strengthen the dosage of the gas after the initial infusion did not seem to be having the desired effect. The chief anesthesiologist of Moscow, Yevgenii Evdokimov, has speculated: "The death of those people was possibly caused by an overdose of the substance [in the gas]."(110) The website gzt.ru wrote on 28 October: "It has become known to 'Gazeta' that the first attempt to neutralize the bandits located among the hostages did not succeed -- the concentration of the poisonous substance turned out to be insufficient."(111)

According to an October 2003 statement by the press department of the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office, 125 hostages died from the effects of the gas, some of them following the storm while they were in hospital, while five were killed by the terrorists.(112) The actual death toll from the effects of the gas might, according to some estimates, have in fact exceeded 200.(113) In addition, scores of other hostages were reported at the time to be seriously ill from the effects of the gas.(114) In April 2003, a lawyer representing some of the former hostages asserted that approximately 40 more of the hostages had died since 26 October 2002.(115) In October 2003, the newspaper "Versiya," summing up the results of an investigation conducted by its journalists, stipulated that "about 300" of the former hostages were now dead.(116) The incompetence and the disorganization of the medical and emergency teams called in to treat the ill and the dying were unquestionably a cause of many of the deaths. The medical teams, in their defense, had not been informed about what was in the gas. When the Russian State Duma declined to carry out an inquiry into the actions of the medical teams, the Union of Rightist Forces conducted its own investigation and then published its scathing findings.(117)

At 8:00 a.m. on 26 October, one hour after the building had been declared liberated, Russian state television (RTR) showed the following mendacious tableau: "The gang leader [Movsar Baraev] met his death with a bottle of brandy in his hand. According to special-purpose-unit men, they found an enormous number of used syringes and empty alcohol bottles on the premises. The criminals, who described themselves as champions of Islam and freedom fighters, must have spent the last hours in the theater bar. Even the women, officers say, smelt strongly of alcohol. Probably because of that,... [the women terrorists] did not have time to set in motion the explosive devices attached to their waists. According to specialists, each device contains at least 800 grams of TNT. Besides, in order to increase the impact, the devices were filled with ball bearings and nails. Another explosive device was planted in the center of the hall, which, to all appearances, was intended to make the ceiling collapse. And there is a whole arsenal on the stage: assault rifles, TNT, cartridges. And the most interesting are these homemade grenades. Despite their small size, they are extremely powerful."(118) (By this time, if not earlier, the Russian authorities must have become fully aware that the explosives placed in the hall had been incapable of detonating.)

On 27 October, President Putin invited the special forces commandos from the "Alfa" and "Vympel" units who had taken back the theater to a special reception at the Kremlin. In his remarks, Putin praised the professionalism of the two units of the FSB, and he then joined with them in a silent standing toast.(119) In early January 2003, shortly after New Year's Eve, "Putin signed a secret decree to award six people with Hero of Russia stars, including three FSB officials and two soldiers from the special units 'Alfa' and 'Vympel.' The fifth 'hero' is the chemist who gassed the theater center."(120)

Following the storming of the theater building, the president's approval ratings for his conduct of the war in Chechnya shot up in the polls: "If in September, 34 percent of Russian citizens had been in favor of continuing military actions, while 56 percent had favored peace negotiations, at the end of October -- for the first time since the beginning of 2001 -- the opinions divided almost half and half: 46 percent were for military actions, while 45 percent were for negotiations."(121)

QUESTIONS

From the testimony of former hostages interviewed by the Russian media, it seems virtually certain that the terrorists did have ample time to destroy many of the hostages before they themselves had been overcome by the gas or shot by the attacking special forces. Why did they not do so? As we have seen, most of the explosives in the building were "fakes" or very weak bombs presenting a danger principally to the women terrorists wearing them. Even without detonating the bombs, however, the terrorists carried real automatic weapons and could easily have raked the hostages with automatic-weapon fire. They clearly chose, however, to let the hostages live. Even an Interior Ministry general who had been identified by the terrorists and had been separated from the other hostages was not killed (though his daughter died from the effects of the gas).(122) Theater producer Vasilev has recalled: "When the shooting began, they [the terrorists] told us to lean forward in the theater seats and cover our heads behind the seats."(123)

How many of the terrorists were killed in the raid? In June 2003, Moscow City Prosecutor Mikhail Avdyukov stipulated that a total of 40 terrorists had been killed and that none had managed to escape.(124) The same figure was given by Avdyukov's successors in October 2003.(125) At 9:44 a.m. on 26 October 2002, however -- that is, almost three hours after the building had been declared liberated -- it was reported by Interfax that only 32 terrorists had been killed. The same day, the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, affirmed that "34 gunmen were killed and an unspecified number arrested."(126) By contrast, on 28 October, gzt.ru, a "centrist" publication, reported that "50 terrorists -- 32 men and 18 women" had been killed and "three others taken into custody."(127) The compromise figure of 40 dead terrorists was arrived at later.

A number of questions have been asked by analysts and journalists about whether or not the de facto leader of the terrorists, Abubakar, had in fact been killed. In June 2003, Moscow Prosecutor Avdyukov insisted that Ruslan Abu-Khasanovich Elmurzaev's body had been found and identified.(128) In March 2003, however, retired FSB Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Trepashkin had written that, following the events at Dubrovka, "I proposed to the investigators that they try to identify 'Abubakar' in the first days after the event. However, later an investigator telephoned and said that he could not find the corpses of a number of people, including that of 'Abubakar,' and therefore there would be no identification."(129) And journalist Aleksandr Khinshtein has reported: "At first there existed a version that Abubakar died during the storming of the House of Culture.... But a series of examinations showed that there was no Abubakar in the hall."(130) Despite Prosecutor Avdyukov's statement, it appears thus to be an open question as to whether or not Abubakar was killed.

In October 2003, film director Sergei Govoroukhin, one of the volunteer negotiators who had spoken at length with Abubakar at Dubrovka, stated his belief that Abubakar was still alive. Despite his persistent requests, he said, Russian prosecutors had proved unable to show him Abubakar's body. "Moreover," Govorukhin continued, "two weeks ago, during a trip to Chechnya, I asked intelligence [officers] of the Combined Group of Forces of the Northern Caucasus whether it was true that Abubakar was in Chechnya. I was uniformly given the same answer: 'Of course he is here. He has shown himself rather actively in recent times, and only for the past month has nothing been heard of him.' Therefore I can maintain absolutely accurately that he is alive."(131)

Similarly, also in October 2003, an investigative report appearing in the newspaper "Kommersant" noted that "until the summer of this year [2003], when the case concerning the explosion at McDonald's restaurant was being investigated by the procuracy of the western district [okrug] of Moscow, Ruslan Elmurzaev was still on the wanted list. He was removed from the wanted list only when the case was taken over by the Moscow [City] Prosecutor's Office."(132) The same report also added this key detail: "As sources in the FSB and [Interior Ministry] have made clear, the terrorists themselves ordered that the bombs [in the Dubrovka theater] be rendered harmless before the seizing of the hostages. Abubakar was supposedly afraid of accidental explosions."(133)

AFTERMATH OF THE HOSTAGE-TAKING INCIDENT

On the evening of 6 February 2003, a sensation of sorts was created when "the head of the operational-investigative department of the MUR [Moscow Criminal Investigations Office], Yevgenii Taratorin, made an unexpected announcement on the television program 'Man and the Law.'" In Taratorin's words, "In October-November of last year, in addition to seizing the theater center at Dubrovka, the band of Movsar Baraev planned explosions in the Moscow underground, at a popular restaurant, and at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. In the words of the policeman, the operatives of the capital's criminal-investigation unit were able to avert all of these terrorist acts." Following the explosion of the "Tavriya" car bomb at McDonald's restaurant on Porkryshkin Street in Moscow on 19 October, Taratorin related, the MUR discovered "in the center of Moscow at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in direct proximity to the GAI [traffic police] post an automobile of silver color containing explosives." Quick action by the MUR and the arrest of certain of the terrorists, Taratorin claimed, forced the hostage takers to move up the date of their assault on the theater at Dubrovka from 7 November to 23 October.

According to Taratorin, "on 24 October, the operatives averted two other terrorist acts: the explosion of an automobile at the Pyramid [Restaurant] in Pushkin Square and the self-detonation of a female suicide bomber at one of the stations of the capital's underground." The terrorists, sensing the danger of a rapid unmasking, then fled to the North Caucasus region. (Taratorin appears here to be exaggerating the achievements of the MUR: the bombings failed to occur, as we have seen, most likely either because the terrorists "exhibited cowardice" or because the bombs themselves were faulty in design or construction.)

In the course of his televised statement, Taratorin added that, in November 2002, in the village of Chernoe in Moscow Oblast, the police had "discovered a house in which, among apples, there was found ammunition and, next to the cottage, a hiding place in which explosives brought from Ingushetia had first been concealed."(134) (The explosives, he said, had later been transferred to two garages located on Leninskii Prospekt and Ogorodnyi Proezd in Moscow.) In January 2003, Taratorin added, two of the intended car bombs had been found in a parking lot off Zvenigorod Highway.

Most sensationally of all, Taratorin claimed that "five people" in all had been arrested for participating in the terrorist act. Queried about this statement, the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office insisted heatedly that only two persons had so far been arrested, one of them the walk-on Chechen volunteer Zaurbek Talikhigov. Journalists soon discovered, however, that "three more Chechens whom they had connected to Dubrovka had been released last November [2002]."(135)

Following this televised statement by the MUR colonel, "the procuracy opened against Yevgenii Taratorin a [criminal] case for his having revealed a secret of the investigation. But this did not stop the colonel -- in particular, he intended to meet with journalists...in order to relate to them the details of the investigation in the course of which the MUR officers did not succeed in finding understanding on the part of the 'neighbors' from the FSB."(136) Taratorin was placed under arrest by the FSB on 23 June 2003, as part of a putative "campaign against werewolves" in the Russian Interior Ministry.(137) This lengthy campaign and media reactions to it strongly suggested that the arrest of Taratorin, like that of Trepashkin, was a selective one triggered solely by the need to silence an official who had begun to expose the fabric of lies that constituted the official version of events.

Taratorin's revelations were embarrassing to the FSB and the Prosecutor-General's Office because they drew attention to the fact that two major suspects who had been seized by police at Chernoe on 22 November 2002 had been released: a recently retired GRU major, Arman Menkeev; and a Chechen originally from Vedeno, Khampash Sobraliev, the man who had collected the suicide belts from the women terrorists on 24 October after they had apparently failed to work. "For a long time," however, "Kh. Sobraliev was not charged under Article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (terrorism). This led to his refusal to cooperate with the investigators."(138) In an article appearing in April 2003, journalist Zinaida Lobanova noted that Khampash Sobraliev, Arman Menkeev, and Alikhan Mezhiev "were not charged and were then set free."(139) Only Akhyad Mezhiev, Alikhan's brother, who had been arrested on 28 October 2002, was still being kept in custody.

When the police raided the terrorist base at Chernoe in November 2002, another of the terrorists, Aslambek Khaskhanov, reportedly managed to escape from the premises. In late April 2003, however, Khaskhanov was located and then arrested in Ingushetia. "The Chechen had made his way [from Moscow] to Grozny and concealed himself for almost half a year. At the end of April [2003], he was taken into custody and brought to Moscow. During interrogations he related that in one of the homes on Nosovikhinskii Highway [in Chernoe] were concealed plastic explosives. The operatives arrived with dogs trained to sniff out explosives at House No. 100."(140) Under interrogation, Khaskhanov reportedly told the police about a huge cache of explosives hidden near the house: 400 kilograms of plastic explosives in total. "'Four hundred kilos of plastic explosives,' whistled one expert. 'That is enough to blow the Kremlin and Red Square to the devil."(141)

In an interview appearing in the government newspaper "Rossiiskaya gazeta" in June 2003, then Moscow City Prosecutor Avdyukov reported that, in addition to Khaskhanov, "Aslan Murdalov, the brothers Alikhan and Akhyad Mezhiev, Khampash Sobraliev, and Arman Menkeev are all now under arrest."(142)

Once Avdyukov and other Moscow prosecutors had been purged from their posts, a "cleansed" Moscow Prosecutor's Office began to surface a new and radically altered version of events. The press office of the procuracy informed "Kommersant" on 22 October 2003 that five individuals -- Aslambek Khaskhanov, Aslan Murdalov, the brothers Alikhan and Akhyad Mezhiev, and Khampash Sobraliev -- were now being charged with "belonging to a group which as far back as 2001 had been sent by Shamil Basaev to commit terrorist acts in Moscow."(143) Significantly, retired GRU Major Menkeev was no longer being charged by the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office. Menkeev confirmed this fact to the newspaper "Versiya," noting that he had been released from prison on 20 October 2003. "I want to say that all charges concerning my participation in a terrorist act have been dropped," Menkeev emphasized.(144)

The version of events being related by the press department of the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office in October 2003 differed in major ways from the former account of the now-purged Mikhail Avdyukov-led procuracy.(145) According to the new version, "the Urus-Martan Wahhabi [Aslambek] Khaskhanov" had, in the fall of 2001, sent a team consisting of seven rebels to Moscow. Once there, they had purchased three vehicles, one of them a "Tavriya," "which they intended to mine and blow up in parking lots at the buildings of the State Duma [!] and at the McDonald's restaurant at Pushkin Square." The rebels had received plastic explosives "from persons who have not been identified by investigators." It emerged, however, that the plastic explosive employed by the rebels was in fact "imitation plastic explosive" which originally had "a Ministry of Defense origin." "It is fully possible," the account continued, "that the imitation plastic explosive was provided to the terrorists of Khaskhanov by the former employee of the GRU, Major Arman Menkeev, a specialist in explosive substances." Not surprisingly, the account noted, the bombs placed at the building of the State Duma and in Pushkin Square had failed to work. Did this whole operation of 2001 -- if it in fact occurred -- escape official notice completely? This would be quite extraordinary, especially in the wake of 11 September 2001.

"The group of Aslambek Khaskhanov," the revised Moscow City Prosecutor's Office account continued, "came to Moscow a second time, already in the fall of 2002. This time the terrorists also planned to commit a series of explosions after which, making use of the panic and confusion, one other group of rebels under the command of Movsar Baraev and Ruslan Elmurzaev (Abubakar) was to perform a mass seizure of hostages." On 19 October, the group, using a land mine (fugas), set off a car bomb in a "Tavriya" vehicle parked at the McDonald's on Pokryshkin Street. Once the Baraevites had seized the theater building, the Khaskhanov group then chose to go underground.

The new and quite drastically revised version of events currently being put out by the post-purge Moscow City Prosecutor's Office strikes one as, in essence, a complete fabrication. Most of the key discoveries made by the MUR and by the now-"cleansed" former Moscow procuracy have been adroitly swept under a rug, while Arman Menkeev's role in the events of October 2002 is now passed over in total silence.

CONCLUSION

Elements among both the Russian leadership and the power ministries and among the Chechen extremists obtained their principal goals in the assault on the theater at Dubrovka: namely, an end was put to the negotiation process while Aslan Maskhadov's reputation was besmirched, and the terrorists, for their part, had an opportunity to stage a grandiose fund-raiser. The Russian authorities, moreover, were now able to demonstrate to the entire world that Moscow, too, had been a victim of an Al-Qaeda-style Chechen terrorist act. As in 1999, the chief victims of these terrorist acts were the average citizens of Moscow. The bulk of the evidence, as we have seen, points to significant collusion having occurred on the part of the Chechen extremists and elements of the Russian leadership in the carrying out of the Dubrovka events.

(John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.)

FOOTNOTES

(92) For a list of the negotiators, see "Te, kto ne strelyal," "Moskovskie novosti," 29 October 2002. The presence of the name of Sergei Dedukh here is incorrect; he visited the theater in the capacity of a correspondent for NTV. The information concerning Igrunov's visit appeared in "Gazeta Wyborcza" (Poland), 24 October 2002, posted at chechnya-sl@yahoogroups.com, 24 October 2002. Politkovksaya paid tribute to Aslakhanov's role in "Posle 57 chasov," "Novaya gazeta," No. 82, 4 November 2002.      

(93) Alex Nicholson, "Yavlinsky Describes His Role in Crisis," "The Moscow Times," 5 November 2002.      

(94) Olga Tropkina, "Vvedenie tsenzury dopustimo," "Nezavisamaya gazeta," 28 October 2002.      

(95) Anna Politkovskaya, "My Hours Inside the Moscow Theater."      

(96) newsru.com, 27 October.      

(97) "Gazeta.ru reskonstruirovala shturm,'" gazeta.ru, 28 October 2002.      

(98) Pavel Felgengauer, "'Nord Ost': reputatsiya ili gaz?" "Novaya gazeta," 27 October 2003.      

(99) "Yavlinsky Describes his Role in the Crisis."      

(100) "Gazeta.ru rekonstruirovala shturm," gazeta.ru, 28 October 2002.      

(101) "Russian pundit critical of hostage rescue operation, policy on Chechnya," Ekho Moskvy Radio, BBC Monitoring Service, 26 October 2002.       (102) "Feat of Arms," gzt.ru, 31 October 2002. In English.      

(103) Valerii Yakov, "My vse zalozhniki Kremlya," "Novye izvestiya," 29 October 2002. See also: "Two Hostages Killed in Moscow Theater," AP, 26 October 2002, posted at 4:52 a.m.      

(104) "Russian pundit critical..."      

(105) "Tri dnya v adu," "Komsomolskaya pravda," 29 October 2002.      

(106) Viktor Baranets in "Komanda-shturm!" Komsomolskaya pravda, 29 October 2002.      

(107) Cited in Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, "Gas in Raid Killed 115 Hostages," "The Washington Post," 28 October 2002.      

(108) "Gazeta.ru rekonstruirovala shturm," gazeta.ru, 28 October 2002.      

(109) gazeta.ru, 31 October 2002. Testimony of hostage Aleksandr Zeltserman, a resident of Latvia. The accounts of special forces personnel who participated in the storming suggest that they began letting in the gas at about 1:15 a.m. See "Ofitsery 'Alfy' i 'Vympela' o shturme," gzt.ru, 30 October 2002. The article "Kreml nameren skryt pravdu o terakte na Dubrovke," apn.ru, 1 November 2002 states that they began pouring in the gas "at about 2:30 a.m. on 26 October -- that is, approximately three hours (!!) before the storm."      

(110) Sergei Dyupin, "Peredozirovka," "Kommersant," 28 October 2002.      

(111) "Osvobozhdenie: neizvestnye podrobnosti," gzt.ru, 28 October 2002.      

(112) Sergei Topol, Aleksandr Zheglov, Olga Allenova, "Antrakt posle terakta," "Kommersant," 23 October 2003. A year previously, Andrei Seltsovskii, chair of the Moscow Committee on Health, had stated that "only two [hostages] died of gunshot wounds." ("Peredozirovka," "Kommersant," 28 October 2002)      

(113) I stipulated the number 204 in my "Taking a New Look at the Hostage-Taking Incident," "Chechnya Weekly," 17 December 2002. Julius Strauss, who had been in an apartment building with a clear view of the main entrance to the theater, wrote in "Kremlin Keeping Siege Deaths Secret to Avoid Criticism," "The Daily Telegraph," 31 October 2002: "There are now fears that the final death figure, if it is ever published, may be above 200." The website utro.ru reported on 28 October 2002 that 160 hostages had already died and that 40 were in the hospital in such a grave condition and that they could not be saved.      

(114) Judith Ingram, "Moscow Theater Hostages Face Poor Health," Associated Press, 6 December 2002.      

(115) Margarita Kondrateva, "Zhertvy 'Nord-Osta' provodyat nezavisimoe rassledovanie," gzt.ru, 28 April 2003.      

(116) In "Versiya," 21 October 2003.      

(117) See "Duma says no to theater terrorism inquiry," gazeta.ru, 1 November 2002. For the text of the Union of Rightist Forces' report, see "Kak eto bylo? Spasenie zalozhnikov ili unichtozhenie terroristov?" "Novaya Gazeta," No. 86, 21 November 2002.      

(118) "Empty alcohol bottles, syringes found inside Moscow siege building," RTR, BBC Monitoring Service, 8:00 a.m., 26 October 2002.      

(119) "Putin priglasil v Kreml 'Alfu' i 'Vympel,'" "Komsomolskaya pravda," 1 November 2002.      

(120) Vladimir Kovalev, "Russia: Heroes and Lawyers," Transitions Online, http://www.tol.cz, 10 March 2003. See also Yurii Shchekochikhin, "Sekretnye geroi," "Novaya gazeta," No. 16, 3 March 2003.      

(121) Yurii Levada, "Reiting voiny," "Novoe vremya," 5 November 2002.      

(122) Testimony of hostage Ilya Lysak, in "Novaya gazeta," 14 November 2002.      

(123) Reuters, 27 October 2002.      

(124) "V Moskve gotovilos chetyre 'Nord-Osta,'" "Rossiiskaya gazeta," 20 June 2003.      

(125) Sergei Topol, Aleksandr Zheglov, Olga Allenova, "Antrakt posle terakta," "Kommersant," 23 October 2003.      

(126) "Russian Security Service Says No Gunmen Escape," AP, 26 October 2002.      

(127) "Osvobozhdenie: neizvestnye podrobnosti," gzt.ru, 28 October 2002.       (128) "V Moskve gotovilos..."      

(129) Mikhail Trepashkin, "Spravka," 23 March 2003. Lengthy excerpts from this document were published in "Tainstvennyi 'Abubakar,'" chechenpress.com, 31 July 2003. On 27 December 2003, the website grani.ru published a statement by Mikhail Trepashkin, which had been smuggled out of prison, in which he asserted that he was being physically tortured by the authorities.      

(130) In "Moskovskii komsomolets," 23 May 2003.      

(131) Zoya Svetova, "Ya uveren, chto Abubakar zhiv..." ruskur.ru, 23 October 2003.      

(132) Sergei Topol, Aleksandr Zheglov, Olga Allenova, "Antrakt posle terakta," "Kommersant," 23 October 2003.      

(133) Ibid.      

(134) Leonid Berres, "MUR opravdalsya za 'Nord-Ost,'" izvestia.ru, 7 February 2003. See, too, Andrei Skrobot, "V 'Lefortovo' doprashivayut geroev 'Nord-Osta,'" "Nezavsimaya gazeta," 25 June 2003.      

(135) "MUR opravdalsya..."      

(136) Andrei Salnikov, "Peredel vnutrennikh del," "Kommersant-Dengi," 7 July 2003.      

(137) gzt.ru, 24 June 2003.      

(138) Aleksandr Khinshtein, "Glavnyi terrorist 'Nord-Osta,'" "Moskovskii komsomolets," 23 May 2003.      

(139) Zinaida Lobanova, "Tolko on otvetit za 'Nord-Ost,'" "Komsomolskaya pravda," 22 April 2003.      

(140) Andrei Skrobot, "Vzryvy v Moskve gotovyat v Podmoskove," "Nezavisimaya gazeta," 6 June 2003.      

(141) Zinaida Lobanova et al., "Naiden ment, pustivshii terroristov v 'Nord-Ost,'" "Komsomolskaya pravda," 9 June 2003.

(142) "V Moskve gotovilos chetyre 'Nord-Osta,'" "Rossiiskaya gazeta," 20 June 2003.      

(143) Sergei Topol, Aleksandr Zheglov, Olga Allenova, "Antrakt posle terakta," "Kommersant," 23 October 2003.      

(144) In Irina Borogan, "Obvinyaemogo v tragedii 'Nord-Osta' vypustili na svobodu," "Versiya," No. 41, October 2003. On Menkeev, see also Aleksandr Elisov, "Zov krovi," mk.ru, 24 October 2003.      

(145) Sergei Topol, Aleksandr Zheglov, Olga Allenova, "Antrakt posle terakta," "Kommersant," 23 October 2003.

(Compiled by Roman Kupchinsky)

Copyright (c) 2004. RFE/RL, Inc. All rights reserved.

CHECHNYA: DOES THE USE OF THE TERM "CHECHEN NETWORK" WITHOUT ANY PROOF OF THE INVOLVEMENT OF CHECHENS NOT CONSTITUTE INCITEMENT TO RACIAL HATRED?

Brussels, 16 January 2004. Increasingly often, magistrates from EU member countries are using terms that tend to give substance to the idea that Chechens are involved in terrorist networks active in the European Union. The French magistrate Bruguière, for example, has used the concept of "Chechen networks" to define everything remotely connected with international terrorism, although the use of the adjective "Chechen" is entirely unjustified. In actual fact the adjective "Chechen" serves only to define a place - generally hypothetical - where apprentice terrorists AND European citizens might have chosen to go, or to define a place - also generally hypothetical - where humanitarian aid might have been sent.

Question from Olivier Dupuis, Member of the European Parliament, Radical, to the Commission:

"What does the Commission think of the use of the term 'Chechen network' by magistrates from EU member countries - and in particular by the French magistrate Bruguière - to define a criminal affair in which the only involvement of Chechens seems to be the fact that the EU citizens - and not Chechens - under accusation have referred to Chechens as the possible beneficiaries of financial aid, or Chechnya as a place where they could carry out their plan for a holy war? Does the Commission not agree that by acting in this way the magistrates in question contribute, volens nolens, to the spread of false information and to the undermining of the image and the reputation of a whole people, and that they could therefore be responsible for the growth among EU citizens of feelings of racial hatred, intolerance or even violence towards Chechen refugees living in member countries? Could the Commission ask the European Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna to carry out a thorough investigation into the extent of practices such as those outlined above, with regard both to the Chechen people and to other peoples, and into the political, juridical and judicial implications that such practices could have?"

www.radicalparty.org

===== Don't forget Chechnya! You can support the Chechen Minister of Foreign Affairs Peace Plan for the establishment of an interim United Nations administration in Chechnya by signing the appeal on the TRP site: www.radicalparty.org =====

Olivier Dupuis Member of the European Parliament http://www.radicalparty.org/ tel. +32 2 284 7198 fax +32 2 284 9198

Putin tells Chechen govt to lay off rights groups

By Oliver Bullough

MOSCOW, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, known for his hardline stance on the war in Chechnya, said on Friday human rights groups should be allowed to work freely with Chechens, in what activists dismissed as a pre-election ploy.

Putin met Stanislav Ilyasov, the minister responsible for Chechnya, who said rights groups were causing "turmoil" among refugees ordered out of tent camps in neighbouring Ingushetia, where they have lived since troops returned to Chechnya in 1999.

But Putin said: "It is you who thinks they are causing turmoil. Maybe they don't give you very comfortable conditions to work in, but they are protecting the people that live there. You need to take this into account."

Rights groups accuse pro-Moscow forces of widespread rights violations in Chechnya, where separatists have fought Russian rule for more than nine years, although the allegations are hard to check, with an information blackout in the region.

Refugee groups have said the decision to make the 7,000 Chechen refugees leave their tents by March is an attempt to prevent journalists and rights campaigners from contacting them.

"If they stay in Ingushetia, they can no longer be considered refugees," said one Chechen official recently.

But many refugees say they are too scared to go back to a region where troops and police are killed almost daily, and rights groups dismissed Putin's comments as a ploy in the run-up to presidential elections on March 14.

"I think that Putin really agrees with Ilyasov that rights groups cause 'turmoil' and he would rather they didn't exist. But he wants to show that before the elections Russia is, at least in some ways, a civilised country," said Anna Neistat, the Russia director for U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.

"All human rights groups know the real situation."

According to some estimates, last year was the bloodiest for troops since Putin ordered them to crush Chechnya's de facto independence more than four years ago. The International Institute for Strategic Studies said there were 4,749 casualties in the 12 months to August 2003.

Ilyasov told Putin the administration was struggling to restore Chechnya's war-torn economy. "The minister reported the working-age population comes to 460,000 people, of whom 170,000 don't have jobs," said a statement from the Kremlin.

Pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov is currently in Saudi Arabia trying to attract investment.