Russian apartment bombings

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The Russian apartment bombings were a series of bombings in Russia that killed nearly 300 people and led the country into the Second Chechen War. They happened over a span of two months in 1999.

1 The Bombings
2 The Official Investigation
3 Attempts of Independent Investigation
4 The FSB Theory
5 External links

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The Bombings

Image:Gurianova1ap.jpg The first bombing, not of an apartment, occurred in Moscow, the Russian capital, on August 31, 1999. A bomb exploded in a mall, killing one person and wounded 40 others. A note was left saying the bombing was a result of increasing Russian consumerism.

On September 4, 1999, a car bomb detonated outside an apartment building housing Russian soldiers in the city of Buinaksk, in the province of Dagestan. 64 people were killed and dozens of others were wounded. Russia blamed Chechen separatists, who would days later invade the province from neighboring Chechnya.

On September 8, 1999, 300 kg to 400 kg of explosives detonated on the ground floor of an apartment building in southeast Moscow. The nine-storey building was destroyed, killing 94 people inside and wounded 150 others. 108 apartments were destroyed. A caller to a Russian news agency said the blast was a response to recent Russian bombing of Chechen and Dagestan villages in response to the invasion of Dagestan.

September 13, 1999, was supposed to be a day of mourning for the victims of the previous bomb attacks. But on that day, a large bomb exploded at an apartment on Kashirskoye Highway in southern Moscow. The eight-storey building was flattened, littering the street with debris and throwing some concrete hundreds of yards away. In all, 118 people died and 200 were wounded.

It was at this time when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared a war against the "illegal military units" in Chechnya. Though there was not much evidence pointing to Chechens, preparations were made by the Russian military forces to re-enter the province and to strip the Chechen government of its powers.

The motive for the forceful solution was quenched when a truck bomb exploded September 16, 1999, outside a nine-storey apartment complex in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk, killing 17 people.

In response, Russia launched air strikes on Chechen rebel positions, oil refineries, and other buildings inside that province. By the end of September it was clear another war over Chechnya was underway, and by October Russian troops had entered the province. The attacks would not be the last in Russia or Chechnya.

On the evening of September 22, 1999, an alert resident of an apartment building in the town of Ryazan noticed strangers moving heavy sugar sacks into the basement from a car. Militia (the local police) were called to the site and all residents were evacuated. The first test of the powder from the sacks showed the presence of an explosive. All roads from the town were brought under heavy surveillance but no leads were found. A telephone service employee tapped into long-distance phone conversations managed to detect a conversation in which an out-of-town person suggested to take care and to watch for patrols. That person's number was found to belong to an FSB office in Moscow.

Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti declared that the incident was a training exercise forty-eight hours later. The original chemical test was declared inaccurate due to contamination of the analysis apparatus from a previous test. The public inquiry committee could not come to a complete conclusion on this and other incidents due to incoherent answers from federal bodies. The General Prosecutor's office has closed the criminal investigation of the Ryazan incident in April 2000.

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The Official Investigation

According to the official investigation, the apartment bombings were planned and organized by Arab terrorists fighting in Chechnya on the side of Chechen insurgents, Amir Khattab and Abu Umar (both of them were later killed in Chechnya). The planning was carried out in Khattab's terrorist camps in Chechnya, "Caucasus" in Shatoy and "Taliban" in Avtury.

This particular operation was led by an ethnic Karachay Achemez Gochiyayev. The explosives were prepared in Urus-Martan, Chechnya at the fertilizer factory by mixing hexogen, TNT, aluminium powder and nitre with sugar. From there they have been sent to a food storage facility in Kislovodsk which was managed by an uncle of one of the terrorists, Yusuf Krymshakhalov. Another conspirator, Ruslan Magayayev, has leased a KamAZ truck, and the sacks were stored in it for two months. After everything has been planned, terrorists got organized into several groups which transported explosives to different cities. Most of the people participating weren't ethnic Chechens.

The following people were participants by either delivering explosives or storing them or harboring other suspects:

Moscow bombings

Achemez Gochiyayev (has not been arrested, wanted page on the FSB site)
Denis Saitakov (killed in Chechnya)
Khakim Abayev (killed by FSB special forces in May 2004 in Ingushetia)
Ravil Akhmyarov (killed in Chechnya)
Yusuf Krymshakhalov (arrested in Georgia, extradited to Russia and sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2004)

Volgodonsk bombing

Timur Batchayev (killed in Georgia in the clash with cops during which Krymshakhalov was arrested)
Zaur Batchayev (killed in Chechnya)
Adam Dekkushev (arrested in Georgia, threw a grenade at the cops during the arrest, extradited to Russia and sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2004)

Buinanksk bombing

Isa Zainutdinov (sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2001)
Alisultan Salikhov (sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2001)
Magomed Salikhov (arrested in Azerbaijan in November 2004, extradited to Russia, found not guilty on the charge of terrorism by the jury on January 24, 2006; found guilty on other related charges such as participating in an illegal armed force and illegal crossing of the national border [1])
Ziyavutdin Ziyavutdinov (arrested in Kazakhstan, extradited to Russia, sentenced to 24 years in April 2002)
Abdulkadyr Abdulkadyrov (sentenced to 9 years in March 2001)
Magomed Magomedov (sentenced to 9 years in March 2001)
Zainutdin Zainutdinov (sentenced to 3 years in March 2001 and immediately released under amnesty)
Makhach Abdulsamedov (sentenced to 3 years in March 2001 and immediately released under amnesty).

Somebody who claimed to be Gochiyayev has sent a letter to several Russian newspapers in which he said that he was just an unknowing participant in a plot organized by an undercover FSB agent, Ramazan Dyshekov. It is completely unclear how credible those claims are.

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Attempts of Independent Investigation

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident [2] [3]. An independent public commission to investogate the bombings chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries [4] [5]. Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, both of them Duma deputies, have since died in apparent assassinations [6] [7]. The Commission lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin has been arrested to become one of the the better-known political prisoners in Russia.

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The FSB Theory

The Ryazan incident on September 23, 1999 prompted the initial speculation in the Western press that the Moscow bombings were orgaqnized by the FSB, the Russian intelligence service [8][9]. Subsequently, the FSB theory has gathered a lot of credence although it has never been conclusively proven.

Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky supported a 2002 documentary film "FSB blows up Russia" ("An assault on Russia"?), financing 25% of the costs [10]. The film accused Russian special services of organising the explosions in Volgodonsk and Moscow. According to research carried out by two French journalists, Jean-Charles Deniau and Charles Gazelle, the explosions were carried out by FSB to provide justification for the continuance of the Chechen War, which in turn helped Putin beat the communists in the presidential election of 2000. There is some doubt concerning Berezovsky's impartiality in this case, as he allegedly had extensive business dealings with Chechen rebels. However, nearly 40% of the Russians gave credence to Berezovsky's accusations at the time [11]

In April 2002 on a visit to Washington, Duma member Sergei Yushenkov pointed to a mysterious remark by the Duma speaker Gennady Seleznev, from which it appeared that Seleznev had known about one of the explosions three days before the fact [12][13].

An independednt documentary 'NEDOVERIE" (Distrust) about the bombing controversy by Russian director Andrei Nekrasov was premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. The film chronicles the story of Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, the two Russian-American sisters, who had lost their mother in the attack, and decided to to find out who did it [14].

A May 20, 2004 LA Times article describes the conviction on an unrelated state secret charge of Mikhail Trepashkin, appointed by a public committeee, set up by four members of the Russian parliament, to investigate the bombings. Trepashkin was arrested shortly before he was to make his findings public. The article states that FSB agent Vladimir Romanovich was identified by several witnesses as the man who rented the basement of one of the bombed buildings; Romanovich subsequently died in a car crash in Cyprus. Trepashkin's wife declared that his conviction was punishment for publicizing uncomfortable truths about the bombing.

Among Western scholars, the theory of FSB involvement in the bombings has been championed by David Satter, the former Wall Street Journal corresondent in Moscow, in his book "Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State", published by the Yale University Press [15].

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