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Alexander Torshin:
Most terrorists responsible for Beslan school siege killed, some still being searched for
Three militants suspected of involvement in the Beslan school siege remain at large, Federation Council Deputy Chairman and chairman of the parliamentary commission probing the Beslan terrorist attack Alexander Torshin told Interfax on Tuesday.
"The majority of those involved in the terrorist attack are dead, except for a couple of militants, whom we will definitely get. They are two accomplices of militants who were not at the school, but who stayed in a camp in the Ingush community of Psedakh. Another suspect in the financing of the terrorist attack is wanted," he said.
According to the Prosecutor General's Office information, 331 people, including 186 children, were killed in the attack on the Beslan school No. 1 on September 1-3, 2004. This number includes 318 hostages, two officers of the Emergency Situations Ministry, ten Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives, and a local resident who participated in the efforts to rescue the hostages. Another 797 hostages and other Beslan residents and 46 FSB, police, and armed forces officers were injured in the siege.
Torshin refuted allegations by Yury Savelyev, a State Duma deputy and a member of the parliamentary commission investigating the Beslan attack, who said that more than 70 militants were involved in the raid.
"We treated Savelyev’s claims quite calmly. If there were over 70 militants, Ossetians would have surely caught some of them. This is the Caucasus; everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everything about everyone else. Kulayev [the only participant in the school siege who was caught alive and who was recently sentenced to life imprisonment] tried to escape, but was caught immediately. We have questioned hundreds and hundreds of people, the hostages as well as the eyewitnesses of those tragic days, and received no confirmed evidence that any of the militants managed to get away,” Torshin said.
"Though, I personally must confess that as a lawyer and not as the commission chairman, I am not 100% sure that there were only 32 militants. However, I have no objective proof that there were more of them, either," he said.
“The whole world heard Basayev blabbing that he had a man sitting somewhere in the mountains, who could provide some information” on the Beslan attack, Torshin said. “How long is he going to sit there – forever? And remember how many theories and indirect evidence that militants who survived the Beslan terrorist attack might be hiding in the neighboring states? But we haven’t heard anything about them in the two and a half years that have passed since then,” Torshin said.
Speaking about the efficiency of an amnesty recently extended to members of illegal armed units in the North Caucasus, Torshin said a total of 337 people had turned themselves in to law enforcement agencies.
"A total of 337 people, including 281 in Chechnya, 38 in Dagestan, nine in Ingushetia and one or two in the Astrakhan region, Stavropol territory, Rostov, North Ossetia and other regions have surrendered since Nikolai Patrushev, head of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee and chairman of the Federal Security Service, announced the amnesty," Torshin said.
"This process has touched all regions in the North Caucasus, which shows that those for whom this amnesty is intended and their relatives have chosen not to stay away from the campaign. An ever-growing number of people who were members of illegal armed groups but did not commit serious crimes have chosen a peaceful life," he said.
"What is striking is that not one of those who have voluntarily surrendered their weapons has complained of any ill treatment. What is also striking is that the number of crimes related to assassination attempts has sharply declined after the amnesty was announced," Torshin said.
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