Investigation into the Episode at Borisovskie Prudy

An investigation into the episode at Borisovskie Prudy could answer the question: did Gochiyayev himself really call the city's emergency services and warn about the planted explosives here and on Krasnodarskaya? Unfortunately, it has not yet been possible to make a definitive conclusion.

Resident Accounts

• Almost all the residents of the house we interviewed (four out of five) confidently asserted that they were evacuated on the 13th, the day of the second explosion, in the first half of the day (the range was from noon to 14:00).
• Police officers rang apartment doorbells, and a vehicle with loudspeakers stood opposite the house.
• Neighboring houses were also evacuated, and traffic on the street was blocked several hundred meters from house 16.
• According to neighbors, one of the residents reported the explosives to the police by phone: she saw bags of sugar being brought into the premises and thought it strange that they were not picked up for several days.

Official Inquiries and Responses

• The Chairman of the Public Commission for the Investigation of House Bombings (hereinafter the Commission), S.A. Kovalev, sent a parliamentary inquiry to the services mentioned in the terrorist's "repentance letter": the police, the "ambulance" service, and the rescue service.
• The inquiry contained a request to answer: were warnings received about explosives being planted at Borisovskie Prudy and in Kapotnya (which is how the terrorist named these places)?
• A substantive response was sent only by the city's civil defense and emergency situations service.
• As the rescuers write, they received a report about explosives planted at Borisovskie Prudy from the "ambulance" service on September 13 at 14:08.

Analysis of Timelines

• This does not contradict witness testimony regarding the time of discovery.
• In principle, it also does not contradict Gochiyayev's words that he called "immediately" as soon as he learned about the second explosion, although even the earliest moment—before noon—is, of course, not "immediately."
• One could assume that a vigilant woman had the strange idea to report the bags not to the police, but to doctors: perhaps she did this during a doctor's visit to her home or while undergoing some procedure.
• But Gochiyayev could not have known about this (in any case, we have not been able to find a single publication that could have suggested this to him).
• And we consider the probability that he simply guessed the channel through which the warning about the explosives was received to be quite small.
• Of course, in his repentance, he listed three emergency services, but "ambulance" looks quite unusual in this list.

Clarifications on Locations and Discoveries

• The rescuers deny that there was a simultaneous warning about Kapotnya.
• The Commission, as far as we know, was unable to contact them further to clarify the inquiry.
• After all, Krasnodarskaya Street is, strictly speaking, not Kapotnya, although it is close to it. It is more like Lyublino.
• The discovery of the warehouse on Krasnodarskaya purely by chance just a day after the start of mass checks is very unlikely.
• This warehouse was found, according to a police report, on September 14 (although its contents were removed for some reason on September 16; one might assume that an ambush for terrorists was being held here; but already on September 15, the GUVD published its request for drivers of light trucks who had transported cargo from house 70 on Krasnodarskaya in early September to come forward; on the same day, it was announced that a Mercedes trailer that brought explosives from Stavropol Krai was found at the 51st kilometer of the Moscow Ring Road).

Inspection Statistics

• On September 14, the Moscow GUVD reported: 7,908 premises on the ground floors of buildings, basements, and semi-basements were inspected in 24 hours.
• Ten days later, they reported the final figure: a total of over 110,000 attics and about 115,000 basements were inspected.
• Thus, the probability of finding both remaining warehouses in the first 24 hours is about three percent.
• It does not increase much even if we assume that in the first 24 hours, only premises in the South-Eastern District were inspected, but that is not the case.

Conclusion on Location

• This is also Krasnodarskaya, 70
• The address "Krasnodarskaya, 70" itself then covered a huge territory on three sides of the intersection near the "Moskva" shopping center.
• On this territory, there is also a large warehouse building