Moslems of North Ossetia regard ammunition found in unfinished mosque in Beslan as provocation

The Spiritual Department of Moslems (SDM) of North Ossetia has disseminated a statement running that the ammunition found in the Beslan mosque in the days of sacred Moslem month of Ramadan is a provocation.

"The fact that the ammunition was planted in the territory of the mosque in the days of the sacred month of Ramadan is highly worrying and demands the toughest reaction. We have no doubts that this is a provocation. Residents of Beslan, namely, its Islamic population, have already felt moral damage," runs the statement.

Its authors write that in such situation the Islamic factor bears a great conceptual burden. "Beslan is a city that appeared in the place of the Moslem settlement of Tulatovo. Moslems were its aborigines. Among those perished in the awful tragedy of School No. 1 there were 182 children from Moslem families. And the second attempt to blow up Beslan starts again from the painful point. While in 2004 the target was the school, now it is the mosque - the symbol and focus of faith, located in the part of the city where Moslems live and where in those tragic days every street had dozens of children's coffins," the statement emphasizes.

The document says that North Ossetia never had any religious problems; and all confessions coexisted peacefully both at the level of parishioners and at the level of leaders of religious communities. However, threats already arrive to the republic's Mufti from anonymous sources, the statement notes.

"These destructive forces try to kindle inter-confessional enmity and split the nation, which is a penal crime. These are all links of one temporal chain and of one ideological set-up. Still, there are forces both here and in the West, cherishing their crazy ideas to disintegrate the Caucasus and tear it off from Russia," note the authors of the statement.

The SDM of North Ossetia has addressed the republic's leaders and law enforcement bodies asking them to give a legal estimate of the fact of finding ammunition in Beslan as preparation for a terror act.