Ex-policeman implicated in Russian school siege

Russian police investigating the the Beslan school siege believe that one of the attack organisers may have been a former policeman who disappeared six years ago.

He wouldn’t be the first to turn traitor.

Police have been implicated in kidnappings for ransom and accused of allowing Chechen rebels free passage through checkpoints – motivated by either money, sympathy for the fighters’ cause or family ties or a combination of all three.

Vyacheslav Izmailov, a former Army major who has worked on commissions to resolve kidnappings in Chechnya, said one example of a high-ranking turncoat is a former interior minister of Ingushetia, a Russian region neighbouring Chechnya.

Daud Korigov, minister from 1997-98, gave rebels the use of a house he owned in the Chechen capital, Grozny, and was even seen there among captives, Ismailov said.

One of the plotters behind the Beslan school attack was Ali Taziyev, a policeman from Ingushetia, according to Russian authorities. Taziyev was allegedly abducted with another officer in October 1998 while guarding the wife of a government official.

The woman was freed in 2000, and the body of Taziyev’s partner was found in Chechnya. Later that year, a court in Ingushetia declared Taziyev dead.

Now, Russian officials say he actually went over to the rebel side, changing his name to Magomed Yevloyev and taking the nom de guerre of “Magas” after the new Ingush capital.

Taziyev, a Muslim, is accused of becoming an adherent of the extreme Wahhabi sect of Islam – the same as al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden – and forming his own small band of fighters.

A top law enforcement officer said yesterday that they are taking a hard look at how police and security agencies responded during the school siege. Meanwhile, students in Beslan returned to class Wednesday, two weeks after the heavily armed militants took more than 1,200 children and adults hostage. The children were accompanied by nervous relatives and armed, camouflage-clad police and the town’s schools held a moment of silence to remember the victims.

Questions remain about whether Taziyev was a turncoat while still a policeman - or whether he was turned to the rebel cause by his captors after he was purportedly kidnapped.

It’s highly unlikely an honest police officer would have been kidnapped and turned to the rebel side without prior militant ties, said Yulia Latynina, a political analyst and columnist.

“Both police and rebels are just absolutely the same people with the same habits and the same way of life,” she said. “They just kill people. The only difference is they kill different people.”