One Week After Hostage Tragedy, Beslan Still Seeks Answers

by Viktoria Loginova
BESLAN, Russia, Sept 10 (AFP) - One week after the Beslan school hostage siege ended in tragedy, relatives Friday were still searching for missing loved ones and for answers over how hundreds died in the carnage which Moscow is blaming on a rebel Chechen leader.
Russian President Vladimir Putin promised the authorities would cooperate fully with a parliamentary commission into the circumstances of the siege, which ended on September 3 when special troops stormed the school amid horrific scenes of loss and carnage.
"Which way was our government looking?" asked Zoya, 66, speaking close to the burned-out shell of the school that has now become a place of pilgrimage with candles and icons.
"In the morning before the siege, the people who lived in neighbouring buildings saw people in masks near the school, but no one seemed to think this was important," said Zoya, whose nephew was taken hostage but survived.
Criticism of the authorities has focused on how a heavily armed band of over 30 militants was able to take 1,200 hostage in the first place and also on the chaotic circumstances of the assault by special forces who reportedly did not have a plan of the building.
So far only the government of North Ossetia -- fired by the republic's embattled president Alexander Dzasokhov -- has taken the political consequences of the three-day siege and its aftermath.
Dzasokhov, under fire for refusing to negotiate in person with the hostage takers, told the Ria Novosti agency that he would be "fleeing responsibility" if he resigned himself.
In an interview with Al-Jazeera television, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov emphasised that the use of force in such cases would be the "last resort," and accused Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev of being behind the attack.
He said he "knew for a fact that Shamil Basayev personally directed this operation," according to an official transcript of the interview provided by the Russian foreign ministry's website.
Basayev, who has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks in the past, and been blamed by Moscow for others which he has not claimed, has so far stayed silent on the Beslan carnage.
Lavrov also blamed Chechnya's separatist president Aslan Maskhadov, who along with Basayev had a 10-million-dollar bounty placed on his head by the Russian authorities in the wake of the attack on the North Ossetian school.
Maskhadov "openly stated that as long as Russia's policy in the North Caucasus remains unchanged, there is no avoiding terrorist acts. This is instigation of terrorism, if not confirmation of the fact he directed it all," Lavrov said.
Putin meanwhile pledged that a commission of the Russian upper house of parliament into how the tragedy happened would get all the documents it needed from the security forces and the prosecutor's office.
"We are all interested in obtaining a full and objective picture of the tragic events linked with the hostage taking in Beslan," Putin said at a televised meeting with the house's speaker, Sergei Mironov.
In a reminder of how terror has pervaded Russia the past years, Moscow was marking the fifth anniversary of the first of two apartment bombings in the capital in September 1999 that together killed 228 people.
"These people died, unable to understand what had happened and unable to know that this was only the start," said the daily Izvestia, under the headline of "Five Years of Terror".
Russia's chief of staff General Yury Baluyevsky meanwhile reaffirmed his warning that the country was prepared to make attacks on extremists' hideouts even if they are abroad.
"If we have information that terror bases are located in a neighbouring state and we do not find an understanding with that state, the question will arise about the use of preventative strikes on those bases," he said.
According to the latest toll, at least 339 people died in the hostage crisis, including 10 special forces members killed in the assault. This figure does not include the 31 hostage-takers killed in a gunfight with security forces.
Six of the hostage-takers identified so far were Chechens, the media has reported, while three were Ingush and one was an Ossetian.
The Vremya Novostei newspaper cited unnamed investigators as saying the commander of the militants was Ruslan Khuchbarov, a man from Chechnya believed to be connected to previous terror acts.
"As his body has not been identified among those militants killed, the special forces do not exclude that he managed to escape," the paper said.
Many relatives in Beslan still do not have the consolation of knowing what happened to their loved ones. The website for a flagship national news programme started publishing photos of mainly children sent in by relatives who are still searching.
There were already over 50 photographs on the website Friday, with the dates of birth of the missing people and contact numbers in the hope that someone may have seen them.