MOSCOW (AFP) - Both houses of the Russian parliament plan to mount a joint inquiry following the bloody Beslan hostage tragedy, the speaker of the lower chamber said.
"It would be appropriate to create a joint commission with the Federation Council (upper house), and it will be a Russian parliamentary commission," said Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the State Duma lower house of parliament.
"The activities of the commission will probably focus on the tragic events of late August and of September 1 to 3 in Beslan. These will be the most important questions the commission will have to examine," he added.
Gryzlov was referring to the explosion on August 24 of two passenger jets which killed all 90 people on board and to the bloody three-day school siege in Beslan, in southern Russia, where over 330 people, half of them children, lost their lives.
Russian authorities blamed both attacks on separatist militants from war-torn Chechnya.
The Federation Council has already been tasked by President Vladimir Putin with investigating the circumstances of the Beslan siege, near Chechnya, which which climaxed into a chaotic battle and scenes of carnage.
The new commission, which will start work on September 22, is expected to look at broader questions of how to improve anti-terrorist legislation in the wake of a series of recent attacks that killed more than 400 people.
The Duma speaker also indicated that a separate commission would be in charge of studying issues of regional development in the North Caucasus.
Some lawmakers have speculated that Russian President Vladimir Putin might be asked to testify in the Besland enquiry.
"If our investigation shows that this is necessary, we are ready to have a talk with the president," said Alexander Torshin, the head of an inquiry launched by the Federation Council upper house of parliament.
"I do not exclude the possibility that the president will want to meet with the commission himself," he told Moscow Echo radio.
Troshin noted, however, that Russian law forbids lawmakers to summon either the president or other top officials for questioning, leaving it up to the officials themselves to come in.
Gryzlov said lawmakers were set to examine draft laws to boost anti-terrorism spending next year and suggested that Russia may need to reintroduce the death penalty for "terrorists".
"This issue has been proposed by numerous members in our society, by our citizens and deputies," said Gryzlov, who heads the United Russia party that now holds a two-thirds majority in the Duma.
"We are discussing the following idea: to introduce into the criminal code the death penalty for terrorists, but not to implement it just yet," he told reporters.
Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin commuted the death sentence for all convicts on the country's death row before stepping down in 1999, and although the death penalty still exists in the law, it is not enforced.