Beslan

The capture of the children in Beslan was preceded by a series of diversionary attacks, a similar tactic to that used by the masterminds of the Nord-Ost theatre hostage-takers in Moscow in October 2002. On 24th August 2004 two domestic passengers’ planes, a Tu-134 and a Tu-154, took off at Moscow’s Domodedovo international airport at 10.30 pm and 9.35 pm respectively. At around 11 pm they crashed almost simultaneously, hundreds of miles apart: in both incidents 89 people were killed. Within days it became clear that the planes had been blown out of the air by two female suicide bombers.

A week later, at 8 pm on Tuesday, August 31st, another woman blew herself up near the Rizhskaya metro station in the center of Moscow. This time 10 people were killed and 51 wounded. It was Tuesday night and the area around the station was full of high-ranking officials, including the mayor of Moscow. Igor, an FSB major and our source for many years, approached the police cordon. The day happened to be his turn to be on duty and he was stone-faced and obviously shocked. In his mind he was thinking of events from a year before; a series of suicide bombings by young women that had targeted Moscow. The last one had been only nine months before, on 9th December, when a young woman blew herself up near the National hotel and only a few steps from the State Duma). Had they returned? It was these bombings that Igor had in his mind when he told the authors: “It’s just awful. Nothing could be worse”. He was wrong.

With the next 24 hours we were to learn that over 40 terrorists armed with guns stolen during the raid in Ingushetiai had captured a school in Beslan in North Ossetia. More than 1,100 people (including over 770 children) were taken hostage.

On Friday 3rd September, the third day of the hostage crisis in Beslan, there were no signs of the impending assault by government force. The security perimeter around the school was weakened; there were no new army deployments. The day before the terrorists had refused to allow food or water supplies into the school, but had released 26 hostages.

For the first two days of the crisis the terrorists appeared to keep the same strategy as that used by their comrades during the Nord-Ost theatre siege – to harass the authorities and to deal directly with prominent politicians, releasing a few hostages with every visit to show their willingness to negotiate.

They allowed the former president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, to enter the school and in exchange 26 hostages were released as a sign of goodwill.

But this time hostage takers refused to deal with journalists, claiming they might be FSB informers. The lessons of the Nord-Ost siege seemed to have been well learned by the terrorists: they hadn’t forgotten how an NTV crew that was allowed to enter the Moscow Theater in October 2002 had revealed later that they hadn’t switched off their cameras while inside the building, at the request of the Operations staff.

Nor had they failed to notice that the famous Russian doctor Leonid Roshal had also revealed his cooperation with the Operations staff during the Nord-Ost crisis. When he went to Beslan, he was forbidden to get to the school.

The well-known journalist Anna Politkovskaya (who has subsequently murdered outside her apartment block in Moscow in October 2006) might have been allowed into the school, but she was mysteriously poisoned on the plane while flying to the region on 1st September. (The results of her medical tests have disappearedii, thus strengthening the view that she was poisoned by the security services). Hardly surprisingly, the attack on Beslan was planned by Shamil Basayev and the actual operation leader Vladimir Khodov (nom de guerre Abdullah). According to a 2005 interview with journalist Andrei Babitsky aired at ABC Nightlineiii, Khodov had a personal letter from Basayev to Russian president Vladimir Putin in which he took responsibility for the series of terrorist attacks including Beslan and the preceding bombings of two planes).

By Friday morning rumors were circulating among journalists that the terrorists might allow medical staff to carry out the bodies of the men who had been shot and thrown out the windows during first day of the siege.

As the gunmen allowed four medical workers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations to approach the school in two ambulances, two bombs exploded almost simultaneously inside the sports hall of the school where the hostages were gathered. It was at 13.05 on September 3.

The explosions almost ruined the roof of the sports hall and part of the wall. In the panic some of the children had seen the opportunity to flee and the terrorists, in turn, started to shoot them, prompting the security forces to begin storming the building.

These events and the entire operation to free the Beslan hostages were by no means comparable with what that happened in October 2002 in Moscow. Officially it appeared to be just the same: there was the Operations staff and security perimeter around the area, there was the FSB Special Purpose Centre (TsSN) sections ready for action. But all these segments seemed to be parts of a broken watch: they were all in one place, all involved in the same movement, but the whole mechanism was out of order. There were plenty of reasons for that, some local, others created by the position of the leadership of the FSB.

North Ossetia is a unique region in the Russian North Caucasus as it is the only Christian-dominated republic and the Ossetians are the smallest ethnic group in the region. Thus from Soviet times the Ossetians were considered by Russian authorities to represent a stronghold of Russian interests in the Caucasus.

When Stalin deported the Chechens and Ingush to central Asia in the 1940s, the Ingush-populated land was given to pro-Russian North Ossetia. It was the reason behind the Ingush-Ossetian conflict which culminated into a brief ethnic war in 1992. The conflict ended with the victory of Ossetians supported by the Russian army. The disputable Prigorodny District of North Ossetia was “cleansed” of its Ingush population.

For both Chechen wars North Ossetia served as a military base for Russian troops involved in counter-insurgency. The headquarters of the 58th Army, the main army structure of the North Caucasus Military District, is situated in Vladikavkaz, the capital of the North Ossetia. In 1995-2000 the army was led by both of the most decorated generals of the Chechen War, General Gennady Troshev and General Vladimir Shamanov.

It was the 58th Army troops who were involved in the conflict with Georgia in South Ossetia in the summer of 2008. Most of the officers of the Internal Troops who took part in the Chechen wars were trained at the Vladikavkaz Internal Troops institute, including Anatoly Kulikov, Commander of the Internal Troops in 1992-1995, who became minister of internal affairs (1995-1998).

For the Ossetians, the army and the internal troops represented a way to find a good job during troubled economic times. As result, in the mid-2000s North Ossetia was considered a legitimate target by both Caucasian nationalists and Islamists.

The capture of the school in Beslan very rapidly became extremely sensitive. Rumors started to circulate amongst Ossetians that not Chechens, but Ingush militants were behind the attack. The local people told journalists they were ready to cross into Ingushetia for vengeance. The old Ingush-Ossetian conflict appeared ready to burst into flames once again.

The situation was further confused when it turned out that the captured school was the same school in which Ossetians held Ingush prisoners during the 1992 conflict.

In these circumstances the Russian authorities could do nothing when the Ossetians started to gather around the area carrying guns hidden since the time of the 1992 conflict. The local militia was even allowed to help in establishing the security perimeter around the schoolv.

The Nord-Ost experience played against the Kremlin. On the day before the siege was ended, one of the Ossetian officers led the authors of this book to the positions of his platoon just 30 meters from the school, where we could see the bodies of murdered hostages that had been thrown from the windows.

“Please, take pictures. Please, write about it. The authorities say that they hold only 300 hostages. We all know it’s not true, they hold more than 1000 people. We don’t want a Nord-Ost here,” he told us emotionally.

In turn the operation to free the hostages appeared to be led by nobody. At 2pm, after almost an hour of shooting, we saw how Eduard Kokoity, the president of South Ossetia, the breakaway province of Georgia, ordered soldiers to strengthen the cordonvii. He was president of another country, but he was one of the people making decisions. And nobody wondered about it because from the very beginning the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs chose to give management of the operation to the local authorities.

It was done this way, not because of the July 2004 counter-terrorism reforms, since the commander of GrOU in North Ossetia was present in the Operations staff even though he didn’t head it. Nor was it because of lack of the generals from Moscow: two deputy-directors of the FSB, Vladimir Anisimov and Vladimir Pronichev (the latter headed the Operations staff during the Nord-Ost hostage siege, came to Beslan on the first day. But nobody wanted to take responsibility knowing that even one child victim would be enough to make a failure of the entire operation. So Valery Andreev, the chief of the local North-Ossetian FSB department, was made a scapegoat.

But when Andreev was named chief of the Operations staff, Beslan turned into a local problem. From his level Andreev had not authority to call upon the troops from other regions. As result, we saw units from non-Ossetian regions in Beslan only the day after the assault. The security perimeter was established partly by the local Ossetian Internal troops, partly by local paramilitary militia. It was naive to expect them to stop actions by the parents of children taken by terrorists.

When the shooting began it turned out that the Special Purpose Center of the FSB (TsSN) was not prepared. Some sections were away from Beslan, training for an assault on the similar building The few officers of the TsSN who were present near the school had been only holding the observation positions and were not even wearing bullet-proof vests. When the shooting begun they had no choice but to storm the school, resulting in the loss of 10 officers, the biggest loss that the TsSN has ever faced.

The operation quickly turned into a city battle. Some militiamen ran from the school taking freed children with them. Others ran in the opposite direction with guns. Around 2 pm one of them shouted to us: “We need hunting cartridges, please, find some!” By then the battle had expanded far beyond the area around the school. Some people had been shooting, some were searching for terrorist informers. Two local militiamen had found one woman who was thought to be a terrorist and only the sudden arrival of her husband has saved her.

After almost three hours local troops appeared to have been hunting one after another. The last explosion has thundered in 11.15 pm. It was a shell from a tank of the 58th Army attached to the Operations staff, firing at the last three insurgents who sat in a cellar of the school. By then it was already known that 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children.

Agentura.Ru, March 14, 2011. See more in our book The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, from which this story is adapted. The book was published in September 2010 by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.)