2:45PM. Some of the terrorist group mixed with the hostages. They wear jeans and t-shirts; they left their camouflage and weapons. But the jeans give them away, since the hostages were going to school in festive clothes for September 1st. In the flow of the running hostages they escape from the school on Komintern Street and cross the railroad. Helicopters pursue the running militants. They are shot from the air. Others are encircled near private houses. The commandos run up to them and execute them. The German journalists comment: “It doesn’t look like they intended to arrest anybody. The commandos shot without asking questions.”
3:05PM. General Tikhonov gives the order to enter the school.
3:30PM. The shooting diminished. Nurpashi Kulayev leaves the school with a group of hostages (in particular with the physical education teacher Tzagalov). The commandos do not have the guts to shoot him in front of everybody. He is arrested.
4:35PM. The fighting is not over. In the rear part of the building the terrorists are resisting with all their forces. On the second floor as well. Some militants barricaded themselves in the storeroom, some managed to reach the basement. They shoot from grenade throwers.
4:40PM. Beslan. Hospital. Already 554 wounded were brought in, 500 of them were sent to Vladikavkaz.
5:00PM. School Number One. The gymnasium, the main hallway, the theater hall, the cafeteria, the classes in the front part of the building are already in the hands of the security forces. The school is burning.
6:13PM. Beslan. The anti-crisis Center. They tell the official number of wounded in the hospitals of Beslan and Vladikavkaz. 346. They are lying as usual. In reality there are already over six hundred. Putin’s proxy Aslambek Aslakhanov spreads the statement “that the number of victims could be over 150.” In reality he knows that they are already about three hundred.
7:00PM. Beslan. The morgue. In order to obtain the body of the dead, the relatives must bring seven meters of cellophane and two bedcovers to the hospital. Yes, they do. The transport of the body is paid by the relatives. The beloved Motherland will not pay a penny here. It costs three hundred rubles to keep the beloved corpse one night in the refrigerator.
7:08PM. Thousands of relatives stand near the House of Culture and the city hall. Many are loudly sobbing.
9:09PM. Beslan. The Anti-crisis Center. The chief of North Ossetia’s FSB Valery Andreyev informs that the fighting in the school goes on. Especially in the big workshop. The tank number 325 of the 58th army arrives to the rear part of the school. It lowers the muzzle of the cannon and shoots in the basement. After this it is impossible to know who was there.
September 4th. 2:00AM. School Number One. The back of the school. Ten explosions, similar to hand grenade explosions shatter the back wing of the school. The death cries: “Allah akbar! Allah akbar!” are heard in the silence. The end.
After this technical, although incomplete, chronology (after all, I am not writing a book about the Beslan tragedy alone) let us return to the issue of responsibility. The militants wanted to negotiate. In general, we know that they demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. The North Ossetian commission concludes, I cite Novaya Gazeta: “To this day there is no complete clarity about the demands of the terrorists. Also unknown is the fate and the content of the tape the terrorists gave to the operational headquarters (given through Aushev, – E. L.) /…/ The RF authorities, in essence, distanced themselves from the responsibility and condemned the entire negotiation process to failure.” (However, meanwhile they prepared tanks, armored vehicles, helicopters, and 1054 hospital beds; we know that the order to prepare the beds came from Moscow).
The question about the responsibility for the massacre of the innocents can be solved if we establish who is the author of the first explosions. Novaya Gazeta writes: “Doubtlessly, the first explosions have a hidden motive – legal and political. The possible appearance of Maskhadov and Zakayev in Beslan put the Kremlin before a difficult choice: allow the rescue of the hostages and thus legalize Maskhadov’s figure and allow the possibility of a political regulation of the Chechen problem. The “unplanned” raid as an alternative of the unfolding of events allowed avoiding such a situation. But it also made the authorities’ responsibility for the deaths of the hostages non obvious.
So the most important is the nature of the explosions. In the middle of May 2005 the trial of Nurpashi Kulayev, the only surviving terrorist from Beslan’s School Number One, began in Vladikavkaz. The witnesses and victims give a straightforward answer when asked about the nature of the explosions. “On one of the last sessions (in September) the following facts were confirmed and concretized by the victims who were present near the school on September 3rd,” Novaya Gazeta, issue 65, writes, “ simultaneously with the first explosion a smoke cloud of a perfect form (which is extremely important) went up vertically over the roof of the gymnasium and bits of the roofing slate were scattered on a distance of up to one hundred meters from the gymnasium. According to the best experts in explosives… both the smoke cloud of a perfect form and the roofing slate scattered on a long distance are the consequences of the roof being fired on from the inside. This fact is also supported by the nature of the hearths and the picture of the fire spreading in the gymnasium. Initially the fire broke out at 1:05PM after the first explosion at 1:02PM in the garret; the ceiling’s wooden overlaps and plastic paneling were enveloped in fire. After this the smoldering paneling and the burning overlaps started to fall on the people wounded and shell-shocked after the explosions. This is also appearing from the testimonies of many hostages who could not hear the second explosion because of their shell shock but have felt the bright burning flame that provoked a large fire inside the gymnasium. This flame could have been the cause of the detonation of one (one of the three, – E.L.) of the large self-made explosive devices. It is the third explosion that was the most powerful one.”
Here I should give the analysis of the nature and the causes of death of 331 people.
Gunshot wounds – 51ne people (21 of them were killed on September 1st and 2nd and 10 people are commandos.)
Splinter-shell wounds – 150 people.
Thermal burns – 10 people.
Wounds caused by blunt objects (fragments of the burning roof) – 4 people.
The experts were not able to establish the cause of death of 115 people because of the heavy effects of the flames, up to complete carbonization.
Now let us turn directly to the testimonies of the witnesses on Kulayev`s triaclass="underline"
“The victim Zemfira Agayeva said how, when the terrorists were rounding up the people, they were shouting that we don’t fear anything, that ‘We are here so that they withdraw the troops from Chechnya’. The victim also spoke about the beginning of the raid: ‘Right after the first explosion was heard, some unbearable whistle was heard from the side of the schoolyard and something exploded again, only it was far more powerful. And a few minutes later it became hot as hell in the gymnasium, I even thought I was burning. These were the flamethrowers firing, although Shepel affirms (Russia’s deputy Prosecutor General Nikolay Shepel) that the flamethrowers could not have put anything on fire. If he was here I would have liked to ask him a question.” Kommersant, 08.03.05.
The victim Rimma Kusraeva: “On September 1st at three or four o’clock at night they (the militants) told us that, from their previous experience, they think that there will be a raid. The militants said then that we should get down immediately, so that our people don’t kill us all and they will be able to resist the first attack. On the following day they came and said that they are declaring a hunger strike together with us, so that they stop the war in Chechnya. They were saying: ‘We are not terrorists, we are freedom fighters.’ And when the first explosion came, one of them told another that the roof was burning. We were led to the cafeteria, from there to the theater hall. Then to the cafeteria again. The children were drinking water there. I ran up to one of the terrorists and asked him: ‘Are you going to kill us?’ And he said: ‘don’t you see who is firing at you? ” “Rima Kusraeva,” Kommersant continues, “told how the militants put the women and children in the window frames and gave them curtains. They were supposed to wave them like white flags so that they don’t shoot at the windows. ‘Then an armored vehicle arrived, three soldiers jumped out of it and started to shoot at the windows,’ the victim said. – I saw how a woman fell, after this there was a heap of corpses on the windowsill. The terrorists did not shoot us at all – I even thought that when they are done killing them, they (the military federals) will go in and kill us all.” Kommersant 08.08.05.