The Wolves of Islam

Adam Dekkushev was caught by Georgian security services and handed over to Russia in 2002. He confessed that Abu Omar instructed him on how to organize and carry out terrorist acts, while plans of the apartment building bombings were developed by Khattab personally. In early December 2002, Batchayev was killed in a Georgian raid on the Pankisi Gorge while Yusuf Krymshamkhalov was apprehended and extradited to Moscow. Magiayev was apprehended by Russian police in Mineralnye Vody. Gochiyayev remains on the loose.

In court, Adam Dekkushev said that he, along with Yusuf Krymshamkhalov and Batchayev, prepared the explosives, transported them to Volgodonsk, and randomly picked the apartment building on Octyabrskoye Shosse to blow up. Abu Omar had promised to pay him for the job, but Dekkushev never got a single kopeck. Dekkushev's appeal to Abu Omar for material help for his family was also rejected. And according to Dekkushev's court testimony, it wasn't the FSB who ordered the bombing of the building as Berezovsky alleged, but the CIA.

The 4 September Buinaksk bombing has been solved too and tied directly to Khattab. Six men arrested in Azerbaijan were convicted of the bombing in March 2000. One of them admitted that he worked for Khattab but claimed that he did not know that the explosives he transported in his truck from Khattab's camp to Dagestan were intended to blow up the military apartment buildings. Khattab promised the bombers $300,000 to drive their truck bombs into the center of the compound, which would have destroyed four apartment buildings simultaneously. They parked on an adjacent street instead and blew up only one building. They complained at the trial that Khattab had not given them all the money he owed them.

The evidence that Khattab was responsible for the apartment building bombings in Moscow is clear. Of course there is also the now well-known story told by Berezovsky too. I remember that the story began to circulate in Moscow almost immediately after the bombings.

Berezovsky says that the FSB, working on behalf of the then newly appointed prime minister and KGB veteran Vladimir Putin (but without Putin's knowledge), blew up the apartment buildings to consolidate Russian society around Putin's candidacy for president prior to the presidential elections by creating the pretext for restarting the war in Chechnya. The idea was that this would ensure Putin's presidential election victory.

There is a second fantasy version that says that Basayev and his brother Shirvani are really long-standing GRU agents and that the bombings were not planned by radical Islamists at all, but by Russian military intelligence. According to this account, all the details of the attack were worked