Kesayeva: Beslan terrorists were Russian federal agents

from Ingushetiya.org [my tr.]:

Ella Kesayeva, co-chair of the Voice of Beslan NGO [representing the interests of the victims of the Beslan attack], has made a statement about the identity of the terrorists who four years ago seized a school in a North Ossetian town. According to her, “the so-called Beslan terrorists were agents of our special services – UBOP [Unit for Fighting Organized Crime] and FSB.” Kesayeva says that this is attested to by the details of the biographies of individual participants in the school seizure which were published in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper on Thursday.

According to the official investigation, which is now in its fifth year, the terrorist group consisted of 32 fighters. The case file on the Beslan terrorist attack contains information on each identified terrorist. The identities of most of the terrorists were established by means of their fingerprints. All of them had at different times been registered with the North Caucasian regional UBOP and UFSB, were on the federal wanted list, had been detained, arrested, and some even convicted.

However, Kesyaeva notes that in the column marked “Conviction” all the Beslan terrorists are for some reason entered as «Not convicted on the basis off Clause 1, Article ch.1. 24 CC RF “. “This means that either a deliberate decision was taken not to institute criminal proceedings against these people or that such proceedings were terminated. Both on the same pretext –- “no crime has been committed”, she says.

"Thus, the criminals who really should have been held in a pre-trial detention centre or served time in prison, were in August 2004 able freely to form an armed gang and commit the attack on the Beslan school," the Voice of Beslan representative believes.

She says that there can be only one explanation for what took place: the so-called Beslan terrorists were actually agents of the Russian special services -- UBOP and FSB. This is attested to by the details of their biographies which have been published in Novaya Gazeta.

According to her, the people who are in a position to explain the matter are Deputy Interior Minister General Mikhail Pankov, and former deputy director of the Federal Security Service, General Vladimir Anisimov. Both of these men, says Kesayeva, took an active part in the counter-terrorist operation in Beslan as a senior “consultants”, and both oversaw the creation of the intelligence network in the Caucasus.

However, despite the insistence of the victims of the Beslan terrorist attack, neither has been summoned to court to testify.