use of children reportedly triggered clash

Use of children reportedly triggered clash of captors

By Seattle Times news services


BESLAN, Russia — Some of the hostage-takers who took over a school in southern Russia, leading to the death of more than 150 children, may not have known what they were getting into, and when they voiced objections to holding children hostage were killed by their comrades, the lawyer for a captured militant said yesterday.

Pieces of the picture of how militants took about 1,200 hostages at the school in Beslan were falling into place yesterday as the industrial town of 30,000 continued to mourn and bury its dead.

The official death toll stood at 335 yesterday, plus 30 attackers, who had been heavily armed with weapons and explosives and had reportedly demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya.

The regional health ministry said 326 of the dead had been hostages, and the Emergency Situations Ministry said 156 of the dead were children. The nine others were not identified.

Umar Sikoyev, a lawyer for a captured militant identified as Nur-Pashi Kulayev, said the hostage-takers' leader did not tell all of them what their mission was and that after the seizure, a fierce argument erupted inside the school, with several in the group objecting that taking children hostage was wrong.


The raid's commander shot the dissidents' leader to death and then, to establish order, used remote control to detonate the suicide belts worn by two women, Sikoyev said.

That version of events lent some support to the idea suggested by authorities and some hostages that conflicts between militants may have led to an explosion or explosions that triggered the shootout Friday after the standoff had lasted 52 hours.

A senior Kremlin official, Aslanbek Aslakhanov, said yesterday that Russian special services had a surveillance tape of the captors fighting about whether to stay or flee just before a bomb they had planted in the school gym went off. He said investigators were exploring whether the bomb detonated by accident or as a result of the internal dispute.

But the captured militant's claims, as related on the gazeta.ru Web site, focused on the initial stages of the crisis and the actions of the siege's leader, known only as "the Colonel."

"According to Kulayev, right after the school was captured, there was a quarrel among the rebels, because many of them were unhappy that the children were seized," the online news publication reported. "The Colonel, in order to establish order, personally killed the head of a group which was not happy with seizing children." Then, to "drive home his threat," he detonated the suicide-bomb belts worn by two women in the group, gazeta.ru said.


In a statement on RTR television, Kulayev blamed separatist Chechen leaders Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev for the action. "A man nicknamed Colonel gathered us in the forest, and they said: You must seize a school in Beslan. They said that this task had been set by Maskhadov and Basayev," Kulayev said. "When we asked Colonel why we had to do this and what the objective was, he, Colonel, said: 'Because it is necessary to unleash a war across the entire Caucasus.' "

The fact the suspect spoke on state-run RTR television and through a lawyer in a country where terrorism suspects rarely have legal representation could indicate the Kremlin was interested in airing his story.

Russian authorities said the raiders were led by four men, including a Basayev bodyguard and a former police officer who turned against authorities and led a bloody attack in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia last June.

All four leaders were killed in the battle at the school, they said.

Reports emerging yesterday continued to portray the raid as a fastidiously prepared operation — in which militants used renovation work as a cover to plant arms and explosives — almost literally under authorities' noses. School No. 1 is about 200 yards from local police headquarters.

That hypothesis appears to conform with other details of the seizure. The approximately 30 raiders arrived in a single military-style truck — believed to have been hijacked in Ingushetia — which, jammed with people, would have been too small to carry the explosives and weapons used by the hostage-takers.

Such a plan echoes some of the recent years' most brazen terrorist attacks. The Kremlin-backed president of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed in May by a bomb in a stadium in Chechnya's capital; the bomb was believed to have been planted during reconstruction work. The huge bombs brandished by the raiders who seized a Moscow theater in 2002 were believed to have been spirited in while an office in the building was being remodeled.

Some see link to al-Qaida

Survivors said the attackers at the school were mostly Russian-speaking Chechens, but Russian officials initially said 10 attackers were Arab, and officials in the town near Chechnya said the evidence suggests a complex operation and the kind of preparation once taught in the al-Qaida training camps of Afghanistan.

When officials entered the school building after the battle, they found syringes. The hostage-takers weren't addicts, but they were taking drugs "to keep them awake," said Oleg Tedeyev, deputy chief of a local police unit. "As a military man, I was surprised how they could position themselves so well."

Soslan Sikoyev, deputy interior minister for the North Ossetia region, in which Beslan is located, said: "I think it's al-Qaida. I think it's Saudi Arabia, Arabs and possibly Afghan terrorists and terrorists who are here in Russia as well."

Others said a direct al-Qaida link was possible but unlikely.

"A very sophisticated group stands behind this — I don't want to single out al-Qaida; there may be unexpected sources," said Vitaly Shlykov, an independent military analyst in Moscow. "There are some [Chechen] contacts with al-Qaida, but to operate in real time? I'm doubtful [Chechens] receive orders and act on them."

Corruption a factor

If the hostage-takers appeared well-organized, the Russian soldiers were coming under heavy criticism yesterday.

Military authorities said they stormed the school when the raiders fired on hostages fleeing in the confusion after explosions.

Local troops — unprepared and possibly short of ammunition — suddenly found themselves assaulting the school, while special forces moved in a half-hour after the battle began, witnesses said

The newspaper Vremya Novostei said that when the fighting started, the two special-forces squads from the FSB security service were discussing assault plans and had not even agreed on approach routes or where the defenders' firing points were.

The Kremlin official, Aslakhanov, said more than 20 elite Russian commandos were killed in the daylong battle, many of them accidentally shot in the back by civilian vigilantes who rushed to the school to fight for their children. Russian officials had said one soldier died in the attack.

Security expert Andrei Soldatov said on Ekho Moskvy radio that the battle began so suddenly that many of the special forces fought without bulletproof vests.

Western analysts said a key weakness was the lack of coordination among police, army, paramilitary and special forces, each controlled by different ministries or the FSB.

"Something must happen right at the top, to coordinate these structures better," said Alexander Rahr of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Rahr also pointed to the Russians' inability to infiltrate Chechen militant groups with informants, and the ability of the groups to exploit official corruption. "You can change the leadership of the FSB all you want, but these [insurgents] are fighting not only with weapons. When they infiltrate Russia, they have cases or bags full of dollars and they buy any policeman who stands in their way."

Compiled from The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.