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Chief Investigator Accuses Officials Over Beslan Tragedy

Posted on: Wednesday, 28 December 2005, 18:00 CST

MOSCOW: The head of a Russian parliamentary commission investigating last year's Beslan school siege said yesterday the regional police department had ignored instructions to strengthen school security and accused local law enforcement officials of negligence.

Alexander Torshin, summing up the results of the probe so far in the upper house of parliament, said investigators would later evaluate the role federal authorities played in a crisis that led to the deaths of 331 people more than half of them children.

He said Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and his deputy had sent telegrams less than two weeks before the militants' raid instructing the police department in North Ossetia, where Beslan is located, to beef up security on the first day of school. But on September 1 only a single policewoman was posted outside the Beslan school, and she was taken hostage.

"There was no information about the planning of terror attacks but there was a warning telegram ... on August 21 and 31. In those telegrams, based on intelligence information, there was an order to the Interior Ministry branch in North Ossetia to strengthen protection of all educational facilities on September 1. That could have prevented the terrorist attack. But they weren't fulfilled," Torshin said.

Torshin also said: "The counter-terrorist operation was plagued by shortcomings." He added that the current system in place for preventing terror attacks was inadequate.

"Many law enforcement officers did not know how to act in an emergency situation," he said.

Nearly 16 months have passed since armed Islamic militants seized more than 1,128 pupils, their teachers and parents in the southern Russian town of Beslan, provoking a tense three-day standoff with security forces that ended in a bloodbath.

Torshin said the decision to report the lower number was taken by the local head of the Federal Security Service, Valery Andreyev, who has since been transferred to another post. Torshin also blamed Andreyev, who had headed the crisis headquarters in Beslan, for poor co-ordination between law enforcement authorities.

Source: China Daily; North American ed.

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