Some reluctant school gunmen 'killed by leader'

Militants appear to have planned their seizure of a Russian school carefully, starting months earlier and sneaking weapons into the building in advance.

Still, some of the raiders may not have known what they were getting into and were appalled to find they were holding children hostage.

There are indications that some of the objecting militants were killed by their own comrades.

Umar Sikoyev, a lawyer for the captured raider identified as Nur-Pashi Kulayev, said the band’s leader did not tell them what their mission was and that after the seizure a fierce argument broke out in the band, with several of them objecting that seizing children as hostages was wrong.

The raid’s commander shot the dissidents’ leader to death and then detonated the suicide belts worn by two women raiders by remote control to establish order in the band, Sikoyev said.

Pieces of the picture of how militants took more than 1,000 hostages at the school in Beslan reveal months of cold, careful planning.

Officials are saying little publicly – Federal Security Service spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko declined to immediately respond to questions today – but Russian news reports citing unspecified sources portray the raid as a fastidiously-prepared operation taking place almost literally under authorities’ noses.

School Number One in Beslan is only about 200 yards from the local police headquarters.

“Why the law-enforcement bodies didn’t know and why they allowed a column of fighters to get into the city past all checkpoints – this is something that can be judged only through rumours,” the newspaper Novye Izvestia said today.

After the hostage-taking ended in a frenzy of shooting and explosions, Russian news agencies cited unnamed security sources as saying that the planners of the raid were believed to have scouted at least two schools in Beslan.

“Judging by everything, they felt the better one for their goals was the main building of School Number One with its half-basement gymnasium annex, where the floor had to be replaced,” the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted a law-enforcement official as saying.

“The bandits were able to bring into the school a large quantity of weapons, ammunition, equipment and explosives, under the guise of planks, cement and other building material, enough to defend the seized place for a long period,” the official said, according to the report.

Regional security service head Valery Andreyev appeared to reluctantly agree. “The special services are carefully checking the version that the terrorists brought in arms, explosives and ammunition ahead of time,” he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

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 neighbouring Ingushetia – which, jammed with people, would have been too small to carry much equipment.

Hostages also spoke in news accounts of a huge quantity of explosives in the school – not only the suicide belts worn by some of the raiders but also bombs hung from basketball hoops and a two-foot-square bomb built in the centre of the gym.

Such a plan also blackly echoed 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 that was believed to have been planted during reconstruction work, and the huge bombs brandished by the raiders who seized a Moscow theatre in 2002 were believed to have been spirited in while an office in the building was being renovated.

Perhaps learning from the theatre raid, when Russian forces pumped in a knockout gas that disabled the militants – and inadvertently killed most of the 129 civilian victims – the Beslan raiders brought along two dogs that may have been trained at detecting gas.

Why the raiders scouted Beslan at all was not immediately clear. However, the city of 30,000 could have been seen as large enough to provide a shockingly high number of victims while not large enough to risk a heavy police presence. It also is the location of the region’s main airport and is on a railway line.

But amid the careful preparations, the attack planners may not have considered psychology.