Investigation into Terrorist Acts

A few weeks later, confusion reigns around the investigation into the wave of terrorist acts. On September 14, during the second explosion of a Moscow house, Russian law enforcement forces publicly released photos of the two main suspects: a man provided with a fake passport in the name of Mukhit Laipanov, and one Denis Saitakov, initially presented as a Tatar, then as an Uzbek. By chance, Mr. Laipanov, the No. 1 perpetrator of the operation, was identified on a videotape filmed in a "Wahhabi" training camp in Dagestan. Both remain elusive.

The Islamic terrorist trail, in which there are "no more doubts," as the head of the FSB just repeated, led to a dozen suspects, including two Moscow Chechens. On Thursday, September 16, investigators descended upon a certain dye shop in the capital. Tests were conducted there, intended to detect components of hexogen—the explosive used in Moscow, the FSB said then—on the hands of all the Caucasian workers at the dye shop. All tests turned out positive, but only one Chechen was arrested. And on Sunday, the head of the FSB announced that hexogen was only a less important component of the explosives used.

07.10.99. Intervention in Chechnya? (Editor's column)

If Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is to be believed, the Russians are restarting the war in Chechnya with a single goal: to destroy the bases of Islamic terrorists responsible, in his opinion, for the terrorist attacks that caused three hundred deaths in Moscow in September. To achieve this, for a month now, the Russians have been unrestrainedly engaging in massive bombings with no connection to the stated goal.

• They are not shelling the mountains with heavy artillery, where the location of the escaped terrorists could be called into question.
• They are bombing the gas and oil installations of this small Caucasian Republic, a member of the Russian Federation.
• They are destroying what remains of Grozny... [question of intervention like East Timor or Kosovo; Maskhadov has been calling for dialogue with Moscow for two years; Basaev is responsible for Dagestan]

But the Kremlin is not starting a war in Chechnya to destroy Basaev's group. The latter is undoubtedly manipulated by one of the clans competing for power in Moscow. Boris Berezovsky, a person close to President Boris Yeltsin, admitted that he financed Shamil Basaev. The Kremlin has never presented even the slightest semblance of evidence of Islamist involvement in the terrorist attacks in Moscow. [reasons of revenge for 1996 and distracting attention from financial scandals].

"Newsweek", New York

27.09.99. Russia's War Hits Home

Bombs shake the heart of the city, and the trails, it seems, lead to Islamic rebels in the remote Caucasus region. Suddenly, no one feels safe (Bill Powell, with Owen Matthews in Moscow, Steve LeVine in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and John Barry in Washington)

[explosion victim about themselves]

Russia's latest war hits home with a brutality that has stunned and frightened citizens of both the capital and vast regions. This is a war that most Russians considered over three years ago, a war with a humiliating truce in the breakaway Islamic Republic of Chechnya. But the conflict was reborn in the last month when Chechen-led rebels invaded neighboring Dagestan. They quickly retreated, defeated by Russian military planes and artillery, only to invade again at the beginning of this month. On September 4, a bomb exploded in a Russian residential building in Dagestan (map). The explosion, it seems, was the beginning of a sophisticated—and ruthlessly executed—terrorist campaign. Three deadly bombings followed—two in Moscow and one in the southern city of Volgodonsk. In total, about 300 people were killed in 16 days of terror. And the secret services prepared for more.

Authorities are branding Islamic extremists from the Caucasus region for the bombings and have rounded up thousands of dark-skinned Chechens, ordering them in reality