Beslan mothers say government failed to learn

Mothers of victims of the Beslan school seizure, their grief mixed with fury a year after Russia’s deadliest hostage-taking raid, said today that the government had failed to learn from the tragedy and had left the country vulnerable to equally devastating terrorist attacks.

The Chechen warlord who claimed responsibility for the assault that ended with more than 330 people dead – apparently playing on suspicions of a state cover-up - alleged that Russian security services provided the attackers with a safe corridor through the region in a bungled plot to trap them.

“The government is supposed to guarantee our lives, take responsibility for our lives, and they haven’t, so we’re taking responsibility,” Susanna Dudiyeva, head of the Beslan Mothers’ Committee, said a day before the anniversary of the attack, which began when militants demanding Russian forces withdraw from nearby Chechnya seized a school in this North Ossetia region town on September 1 last year.

Dudiyeva, whose son was killed in the three-day school ordeal, told reporters that the government has failed to learn its lessons.

“If this isn’t corrected, there will be another terrorist attack like Beslan,” she said. “We are fighting for the truth.”

Many victims’ relatives have accused the government of mounting a cover-up, insisting that the militants had help from corrupt officials to allow them to cross heavily policed territory and seize the school. Critics have questioned how more than 30 heavily armed attackers could have made their way to the school without being detected by police.

The attack, which began on the first day of school, ended on September 3 when Russian forces stormed the school after explosions were heard inside. More than half of the dead were children.

A delegation of Beslan mothers is to meet President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday, to address grievances, including their unhappiness with the official investigation.

In an internet posting, Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev claimed that Russian security services bore responsibility for the siege, alleging that they enabled the attackers to travel unhindered through the region.

In the statement posted on the KavkazCenter website today, Basayev said that a Russian double agent had been among the hostage-takers.

He said that top security officials in North Ossetia had opened a safe route the day before the Beslan siege began for rebels to reach the regional capital, Vladikavkaz. The alleged double agent was supposed to have gained Basayev’s confidence and then led his men into a trap as they were en route to seize regional government buildings in Vladikavkaz on September 6.

Instead, as they were supposed to be performing reconnaissance, the militants seized the school, Basayev said.

Basayev’s claim appeared designed in part to stoke already strong distrust of top government officials in the North Caucasus, the volatile region that includes North Ossetia and Chechnya.

Basayev also claimed that a second attacker had survived the three-day siege and was now with his followers and prepared to testify.

Russian prosecutors say all but one of the 32 attackers were killed; the man they say is the sole survivor is on trial.

The authenticity of Basayev’s statement could not be confirmed independently, but the KavkazCenter site is considered a mouthpiece for his faction and he has never disavowed previous statements that have appeared there under his name.

Shortly after the raid, Basayev said he had masterminded it but put the onus on the Kremlin for the tragedy.

Deputy Russian Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel, who is presenting the state’s case at the trial, dismissed Basayev’s claims and said investigators had no evidence of involvement by the security services.

“The assertions of this terrorist and child-murderer are total nonsense,” the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who has written extensively on Chechnya and rarely seen eye to eye with Russian officials, dismissed most of Basayev’s allegations as “sheer nonsense.”

She said she felt that Russian security services were indeed to blame for allowing the school seizure to happen but believed they were guilty of incompetence rather than of directly assisting the terrorists.

“I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I believe in the rampant corruption that exists on our territory,” Politkovskaya told The Associated Press.