Russia Acquits 2 in ‘Friendly Fire’ Case

The first attempt by Russian authorities to address the problem of “friendly fire” in the separatist republic of Chechnya fizzled Friday when a court acquitted two senior police officers and instead laid blame posthumously on the commander of the targeted unit.

Twenty-two men from the OMON elite police force died in the firefight two years ago in the Chechen capital, Grozny, when officers from one unit fired on another unit arriving in a column of reinforcements, investigators say. The incident is considered the worst friendly fire incident in Russia’s two wars in the republic.

The trial has been closely watched in Russia as a measure of the government’s ability to hold police and military officers accountable for mistakes under their command. Soldiers and police troops complain that poor battlefield organization and friendly fire incidents lead to unnecessary deaths and low morale in the Russian armed forces.

“The case was way too scandalous to be hushed up,” military analyst Alexander Golts said. “President [Vladimir V.] Putin, or someone from his closest entourage, must have issued an unwritten order to find and punish those who were responsible for such a disgraceful incident.”

At the time of the March 2000 incident, Russian officials blamed Chechen separatists. They said rebel fighters ambushed the arriving column of military trucks carrying OMON forces as it neared a federal checkpoint in the northwestern section of Grozny. Russian officials also accused officers from the newly formed Chechen police force of assisting the rebels.

The firefight lasted two hours and left 22 Russians dead and 31 others injured.

Two senior police officers--Maj. Gen. Boris Fadeyev and Col. Mikhail Levchenko--were accused of negligence for failing to provide adequate security for the convoy.

The Grozny district court, which convened in a Moscow courtroom because of high public interest, acquitted both officers. In an unusual addition, however, the judges said that the commander of the arriving OMON unit, Dmitry Markelov, was at fault for improperly ordering the convoy to depart without receiving the proper paperwork. Markelov died in the firefight.

“Blaming someone who is gone is incomparably easier than finding the real perpetrators of the crime,” said Maj. Andrei Koryavin, acting commander of the same OMON unit, who said he had never heard of the paperwork involved. “In fact, today’s court hearing did not have anything to do with finding out who actually killed our guys.”

The verdict appeared to satisfy few, including the acquitted defendants.

“The reasons for the deaths . . . have not been established,” said Liliya Ababkova, Fadeyev’s lawyer. “Fifteen months of investigation went in fact down the drain.”

Many police officials, including the second defendant, Levchenko, continue to insist that the incident was an elaborate rebel ambush.

“It was an action painstakingly planned by the rebels,” Levchenko said as he left the court. “I intend to issue a statement on this.”

The question of who fired first remains unclear, complicated by the presence at the scene not only of the two OMON units but also of groups of ordinary police officers from Chechnya and other regions of Russia. In addition, according to documents from the prosecutor general’s office made available to The Times, OMON and the Grozny-based police had received apparently incorrect intelligence that a group of rebels posing as police would be arriving in the capital that day.

Critics such as Golts accuse the Interior Ministry of being slow to come to terms with the incident and contend that only pressure from the Kremlin forced the trial. Golts described Fadeyev and Levchenko as “scapegoats.”

“No one in the ministry, knowing what horrible mess and chaos accompany every single ministry operation in Chechnya, would ever risk exposing the ministry’s dirty linen to the public gaze,” Golts said. “It was much more convenient and less embarrassing for the top-ranking people at the Interior Ministry to say that the OMON unit was decimated by the Chechens rather than by their fellow policemen. Dying in real combat is less ignominious than being killed by mistake by your own guys.”

Koryavin, the acting commander of the OMON unit, lamented that although the investigation officially remains open, the case is likely to languish.

“One thing is clear--if the real perpetrators have not been found over the past two years, it is very unlikely that they ever will,” he said.

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.