Tuesday, September 07, 2004

The mystery of the Russia hostage-takers

MOSCOW: Names, nationalities and ethnic origins have been suggested, but the burning question about the militants who took 1,000 children, parents and teachers hostage in southern Russia remains unanswered: Who were they?

So far only tantalising details have been released over the possible identities and demands of over 30 heavily-armed militants who surged into the school on the morning where whole families were gathering for the first day of term.

Russian television has not flinched from showing the corpses of the hostage takers killed in a vicious shootout with security forces. A long black beard, a thick ring, a pale-skinned arm, but the dead do not reveal their secrets.

One of the few confident assertions came from the local security service chief, Valery Andreyev, who said ten Arab hostage-takers had been killed, igniting talk about the role of international terror networks in the events.

"There were 10 Arabs, including one African, there was an Ossetian, a Russian as well as Ingush and Chechens," said North Ossetian interior ministry spokesman Ismel Chaov.

A link to Chechnya seems indisputable, given the proximity of the school to the strife-torn republic and comments by local officials. The identities of the hostage-takers have been floated but never substantiated.

"A war has been declared on us, where the foe is invisible and where there is no frontline," Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said, commenting on the unprecedented series of terror attacks to hit Russia in the past days.

A woman released by the captors told the Izvestia newspaper she recognised among them Doku Umarov, a notorious Chechen rebel field commander said to have led a daring raid in Ingushetia that left almost 100 dead.

Ria-Novosti news agency cited an unnamed source as saying Chechen warlord Magomed Evloev -- known under the nom de guerre of Magas -- had been killed by security forces after the siege. But the only evidence it cited were the back epaulettes sewn in with gold thread found on a corpse.

Other unnamed officials told news agencies that the mastermind of the whole operation was Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord who has organised a series of deadly hostage takings and is Russia's most wanted man.

"You can assume it was Basayev because Basayev is behind most of the terrorist acts," said Chaov, echoing the suspicions of most Russians, rather than stating facts.

Even the claims of the hostage takers remain murky, although they held telephone negotiations with officials in the course of the siege. Some sources said they wanted Russian troops out of Chechnya, others full independence for the republic.

"I asked one of them how they could place children under such danger," one survivor told the Kommersant newspaper. "He answered that when his own children were killed nobody had asked him about anything."

The unsettling doubt contrasts with the hostage seizure at a Moscow theatre in 2002 -- when television pictures confidently showed the female Chechen rebels who stormed in during a performance, slumped in the stalls, shot dead.

Perhaps this time, the truth is simply too disturbing to ever come out.

AFP

# ANTENNA SHARON | 1:30:00 pm |