Beslan - Truth and Lies

Ingushetia.ru has published a reply, written in the name of residents of Ingushetia, to the 8-part article Putins Ground Zero, which appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel at the end of last year. At Chechnya-SL, Marius Labentowicz has provided a quick translation of the ingushetia.ru article, which contains some interesting commentary and criticism, including the following:

in the material of German journalists there's a lot of of inaccuracies and errors. There's a tendentious approach to describe a number of events which took place there. We won't focus our attention on the frequent reference of the word of "village-derevnya", when the authors write about Malgobek, Nazran, Beslan and other towns in the Caucasus. The impressions of Germans - accustomed to order can be understood: they walked around our populated areas and saw in them not much of elements of contemporary civilization, they were astonished of absence of elementary urban infrastucture. The important thing is this. Already clearly the journalists attempted to divide the Caucasus into Muslims and non-Muslims. The ordinary western reader after reading this article can draw a conclusion: the whole evil proceeds from the Muslims of Chechnya and Ingushetia. "Unit of terrorists arrived from Ingushetia . "Khodov converted to Islam and became a terrorist". "The youth in Ingushetia departs to the the Wahhabi circles". These and other views have been presented as already established truth.

and also

Without defending terrorists here, it's necessary to say truthfully one more thing. The boyeviks weren't killing the children. They did not shoot at their backs, how it was written in Der Spiegel. A majority of hostages perished under the cross-fire from those, who came to storm the school, the so-called "peoples'militia-[opolchentsy]", who at that moment hardly cared about life of their children. They were blinded by vengeance and pursued only one purpose - to destroy the bandits. And they've done this that way the corpses of terrorists couldn't be even identified by their appearance. The children perished from explosions in the gymnasium, from fire [in the building]. They were shooting at the school from the rocket propelled grenade launchers, tanks' cannons. No one was concerned about lives of hostages. Some terrorists attempted to save the children, they were taking them into a safer place. Now it's forbidden to speak and to write about this. These actions do not
justify committed by them that bloody act of terror. But hostages talk about this among themselves and share this with their relatives, although they attempt to follow a rule - not to give any information to the press about this "honourable-[blagorodnom]" behavior of the bandits.