Picket dated to the eighth anniversary of Ryazan events held in Moscow

The "Day of Mistrust" - a picket against the war in Chechnya dated to the eighth anniversary of the "FSB exercise" in Ryazan on September 22-23, 1999, was held in the Novopushkinskiy Mini-Park in Moscow. About forty persons took part in it.

The participants of the picket built an installation in its centre: broken cardboard boxes with drawn windows symbolizing the multi-storey buildings blown up in 1999. One "house" was untouched - the one in the Novosyolov Street in Ryazan, where the "successful FSB exercise" took place. Near the boxes one could see two bags labelled "Sugar? No, hexogen." This composition attracted passers-by and journalists who rushed to photograph it.

The organizer of the action, a businessman and coordinator of the committee in defence of political prisoner Mikhail Trepashkin, was disseminating free CDs with documentary movies "Mistrust" and "Attempt on Russia" to the passers-by who got interested in the posters.

The picket was also attended by the members of the public commission for investigating the 1999 September terror acts and incidents in Ryazan: Sergey Kovalyov, chairman of the commission and head of the Russian Society "Memorial"; Valentin Gefter, Director General of the Institute of Human Rights, and Lev Ponomaryov, leader of the Movement "For Human Rights."

The statement of the Anti-War Club published in the VoineNet.Ru web site describes the 1999 events as follows: "At night on September 23, in Ryazan in the cellar of the apartment block No. 14/16 in the Novosyolov Street, vigilant tenants found a bag with a white powder reminding granulated sugar. They called up city militiamen, who detected switched-on detonator and clock mechanism inside the bag.

Vladimir Rushailo, the then Minister of Internal Affairs, declared with pride at the sitting of the expanded Collegium of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow that a bloody act of terror had been prevented. However, Nikolai Patrushev, Director of the FSB, stated in his interview to the NTV correspondent that it was "their exercise": "There was sugar, not hexogen, in the bag."

"We have managed to establish that in autumn of 1999 bags looking similar to the one detected in Ryazan were stored in the territory of one of the Airborne Forces' training bases; facts of plundering explosives from military units were documented," the Moscow opposition leaders state in their application.

"Why were the official statements of different power agencies so confusing and contradictory?" the Anti-War Club addresses its question to the authorities. "Why had the Minister of Internal Affairs known nothing about the exercises while boasting about the prevention of the terror act? Is the examination of the substance detected in the bag the Ryazan cellar over at last, and when will the results of this examination be made public?"