Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Russians got school siege warning

Peter Finn Washington Post

MOSCOW – In the month before the Beslan school siege in which 331 hostages were killed last year, Russian security services received intelligence that terrorists might try to seize a school in the region on the first day of classes, but instructions for tightened security were ignored, according to preliminary findings of a parliamentary investigation released Wednesday.

Although the Russian Interior Ministry sent warning telegrams to regional authorities, the investigation found, only a single unarmed policewoman was stationed outside Beslan’s School No. 1 when at least 32 terrorists stormed it on Sept. 1, 2004. She was taken hostage, too.

Citing numerous failings by local and regional officials before the attack, the report found “negligence and carelessness in facing a real terrorist threat.”

The assault by local police, armed civilians and federal troops that ultimately ended the siege was marked by “a whole number of blunders and shortcomings,” the commission’s chairman, Alexander Torshin, said in a presentation of the report to parliament Wednesday.

Torshin, deputy speaker of the upper house of parliament, also lambasted officials at the scene for initially lying about the number of hostages taken, which infuriated both the terrorists inside the school and hostages’ relatives outside it.

Overall, the report faulted local officials, leading to some criticism that it whitewashed mistakes by high-level members of the government of President Vladimir Putin. During the crisis, command centers at the scene were in constant contact with Moscow.

The attacks “can only be compared with Nazi atrocities,” Torshin said. “The hostages who were held in the besieged school were deprived of food, medicines and water. They had to drink their own urine. They were forced to mine the building, and when they tried to escape they got bullets in their backs.”

The three-day siege ended in a storm of fire and bullets. Of the 331 hostages killed, 186 were children. In addition, 31 out of 32 fighters died; the one survivor is on trial.

There have been three separate official inquiries, with sometimes conflicting findings. One conducted by the regional parliament found numerous failings by law enforcement authorities. An initial report by federal prosecutors, released Tuesday, said security services were not to blame for the outcome.

That report angered relatives of the victims, but they generally welcomed the tone and thrust of Wednesday’s report, which was based on interviews with more than 1,000 people.