Beslan: Top officials 'guilty'
2005-08-31 12:39
Moscow - Local investigators have concluded that top Russian officials bear a share of guilt in last year's Beslan school hostage crisis and must be punished, the weekly news magazine Vlast reported on Tuesday.
"The main conclusion is that the authorities, both local and federal, are guilty of the consequences of Beslan," the magazine quoted the leader of an investigation into the tragedy being carried out by the legislature in the North Ossetia region as saying.
Stanislav Kessayev, deputy chair of the North Ossetian parliament, said responsibility for the deaths of 318 people, including 186 children, held hostage for three days in a primary school in Beslan lay above all with the gunmen who seized control of the school.
But he stated: "People will certainly be punished. Especially given the fact that neither Patrushev nor Nurgaliyev have ever said where they were between September 1 and 3" last year, when the crisis was taking place, according to the magazine.
Referring
He was referring to Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia's FSB security service, and Rashid Nurgaliyev, the Russian interior minister.
"Where were the top generals? Where were the top figures in the country?"
Kessayev's comments, presented as a summary of key conclusions from the local investigation contained in a report due to be published in full next month, came a week after a dozen mothers of Beslan victims protested that official investigators were not holding the right people accountable.
The mothers staged a sit-in protest at the main courthouse in North Ossetia not far from Beslan and demanded that top Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, Patrushev and Nurgaliyev be held to account for their actions and whereabouts during the crisis.
Putin said on Monday he was prepared to meet the Beslan victims' mothers, and a lawyer representing them said last week that a meeting with the Russian president had tentatively been scheduled for Friday. No time or place for the meeting has been announced officially.
Tragedy
The North Ossetian parliamentary investigation is one of two official probes into the Beslan tragedy. The other, being conducted by federal authorities, has so far failed to make public any substantive new findings on the origins and development of the crisis.
The local probe, according to Kessayev, blames authorities for not knowing that the Beslan hostage-takers trained in the neighbouring province of Ingushetia, for allowing them to travel without hindrance in a truck on the day they seized the school and for failing to organise effective negotiations during the crisis.
"The main negotiator was a local employee of the secret services who was promised that professional negotiators were on their way from Moscow." These "professional negotiators" never arrived, the article quoted him as saying.