The Talk

The talk is about two Chechens, natives of Grozny: Timur Dakhikov, 32 years old, and Bekmarse Santiev, 40 years old. A paraffin glove test detected traces of deadly hexogen, the explosive used for the apartment bombings, on their hands. But these two, directly in front of the television camera, deny it. One said that everything was a deception. The other accused the police of staging a provocation, "while houses continue to explode," he added.

Investigators reconstructed the true identity of the mysterious Mukhit Laipanov, the terrorist who rented the locations where the bombs detonated in Moscow were hidden. This may refer to Achenere Gochiyaev, a native of the Karachay-Cherkessia Republic. Mukhit Laipanov's documents belonged to a person who died in a car accident in February.

All these people were connected, often visiting an Islamic school in Naberezhnye Chelny in Tatarstan, and, having adopted Wahhabi ideas, were transferred to Chechnya, to training camps led by the Jordanian Khattab.

But these successes, if one can say so, are not enough to reduce the fear that weighs on the population. The fear is justified, for example, by the fact that investigators continue to seize explosives hidden in various warehouses, but there still remains to find part of the 1,800 kilograms, a quantity sufficient to kill hundreds more people.

News Snippets

• 24.09.99. Russian bombs over Chechnya hit Grozny airport. Terrorist alert south of Moscow: mysterious bags connected to a timer seized.
• First bombings of the airport since '96; Putin: "If terrorists are at Grozny airport, we will attack Grozny airport" (without mentioning public areas)

Meanwhile, the fear of new terrorist attacks is growing everywhere in Russia. On Wednesday evening in Ryazan, a city with a population of 530,000 located 200 km southeast of Moscow, police seized bags containing a mysterious substance mixed with sugar and connected to a timer set for 5:30 AM. Upon testing with a detector, the substance mixed with sugar immediately turned out to be deadly hexogen. The building was evacuated. A short time later, however, experts from the FSB, the special services, established without a shadow of a doubt that the substance contained in the bags was not explosive. "Perhaps," says Ryazan Governor Lyubimov, "they only wanted to test our ability to react."