Local Police Faulted in Beslan School Siege

Authorities in southern Russia were warned of a possible attack on a school a day before 1,128 hostages were seized at a school in Beslan, but took no preventive measures even though the attackers were camped near a road and made no attempt to hide, a parliament commission reported Wednesday.

The panel accused local police of “neglect and carelessness” in failing to prevent the attack, but the report drew immediate criticism from survivors of the siege and victims’ relatives because it absolved senior federal officials and agencies from responsibility for the worst terrorist attack in Russian history.

The report is not final because it does not address some of the most crucial questions about the September 2004 hostage-taking, including what set off the initial explosion and what caused the roof fire at the school gymnasium that killed many of the 318 hostages who died, 186 of them children.

“They had a whole year to prepare this; no one was in their way. And still, they didn’t answer the most important questions,” said Susanna Dudiyeva, head of the Beslan Mothers Committee. “The whole point of their report is to demonstrate that the federal authorities handled the situations without any mistakes, and all the mistakes were made at the lower levels. And this is not true.”

Ten law enforcement officers, two emergency workers and a civilian rescue worker also died at the end of the three-day standoff. The crisis began when a reported 32 militants demanding withdrawal of Russian troops from the separatist republic of Chechnya seized a school, holding teachers, parents and children without food or water in a gymnasium laced with explosives. All but one of the militants died.

Commission chief Alexander Torshin told a joint session of parliament that the panel had not yet reached a final conclusion on how law enforcement officers handled the storming and rescue operation, but it expects to do so in the next few months.

Beslan residents have accused the federal authorities of failing to conduct meaningful negotiations with the hostage-takers, then storming the school with so much heavy weaponry that many hostages died unnecessarily when fire collapsed the roof of the gym on top of them.

There has also been court testimony from the sole surviving hostage-taker that a sniper’s bullet touched off the first explosion, an allegation that Torshin said the commission had ruled out, because a sniper would have had no line of sight into the gym. He also said the panel had established that flamethrowers used by federal troops could not have ignited the fire on the gym roof.

But another member of the investigative commission, Yuri Savelyev, told the Los Angeles Times that the flamethrower inquiry was far from resolved. Evidence from witnesses, still being evaluated, suggests that the fire had been ignited in the insulation above the gym ceiling before the explosives in the gym were detonated by the heat, he said.

Savelyev said the panel also had not yet addressed witness reports that hostages placed in the windows as human shields were killed by bullets fired from outside. “They put them in the windows and said, ‘Wave and yell, so the people on your side don’t start shooting at their own, so they see that you are here.’ But they were shot at not only with automatic weapons, but with grenade launchers,” he said.

Repeatedly, the panel’s interim report applauded the conduct of special forces commandos, crediting them with deliberately drawing fire onto themselves and even covering fleeing hostages’ bodies with their own in a rescue attempt that ultimately freed 72% of the captives. Fifty-five commandos were wounded in the operation, along with the 10 who died.

Torshin rejected assertions from many Beslan residents that the commandos and other federal troops stormed the school with the sole intent of ending the standoff and killing the militants, with little regard for hostage lives.

“Believe me, the main task was to save hostages. If there were a different task, we wouldn’t have ended up with so many losses among the ... officers -- they were trying to save children,” he said.

The panel was far less complimentary of local police in North Ossetia, where Beslan lies, and the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, where the militants apparently camped unhindered for days before the operation. Local authorities took no action to beef up checkpoints or road patrols despite several warnings beginning as early as Aug. 6, 2004, from federal authorities in Moscow that intelligence reports had been received of a likely terrorist operation, the panel found.

On Aug. 31, the day before the school seizure, authorities “received information that terrorists were planning some acts against some schools in the North Caucasus,” Torshin said. “The police of Ingushetia were supposed to be on a strengthened service regime as of Aug. 22. They were supposed to check all the movements of groups of citizens to prevent terrorist acts. It was ordered to completely check all cargo trucks, using technical means and special dogs. Nevertheless, it has been established that all these orders were not fulfilled.”

The militants moved unhindered from Ingushetia into Beslan by taking captive a policeman in a civilian car and using it as an escort vehicle, the report said. Only one officer was present at the school that day, the panel said, apparently because others had been diverted to guard the route of the North Ossetian president’s motorcade.

“All the facts point to the fact that the [local] interior minister didn’t take measures to prevent the terrorist attack and the capture of hostages. The commission thinks that the law enforcement organs of Ingushetia and North Ossetia displayed neglect in carrying out counter-terrorist activities,” Torshin said.

This point was in accord with the findings of a North Ossetian parliament panel, whose report last month was critical of the apparent ease with which militants traveled along supposedly secure roads to a school next to a major law enforcement agency. But that report also raised doubts about the official version of how the storming operation started and criticized the federal authorities for a poorly planned and uncoordinated response.

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.