Ella Kesaeva: Russian special agencies were involved in Beslan terror act

Ella Kesaeva, co-chair of the All-Russian Public Organization "Voice of Beslan", asserts that the so-called "Beslan terrorists", who seized the school in this North-Ossetian city four years ago, could be the agents of Russian special agencies - UBOP (Unit for Fighting Organized Crime) and FSB (Federal Security Bureau. This can be concluded, according to Kesaeva, from biography details of the attackers.

According to the investigation, the terrorist group consisted of 32 militants. The persons of most of them were established by fingerprints. In different periods of time, all these terrorists were accounted by North Caucasian Regional UBOPs and FSB Departments; they had been announced into federal search, repeatedly detained, arrested, and some of them were even convicted, as runs the article "Terrorists-Agents" published on November 20 in "Novaya Gazeta".

Materials on the Beslan terror act case contain information about each identified terrorist. For all of them, the column "previous convictions" specifies: "Never convicted under point 1, part 1, Article 24 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure", Ms Kesaeva has noted.

"It means that criminal cases against these persons were either not opened consciously or were stopped. Under one and the same pretext - 'Absence of the crime event'. Thus, the criminals who actually should have been contained in SIZO or serving their terms in prison, could freely form in August 2004 an armed gang and attack the Beslan school," said the co-chair of the "Voices of Beslan".

The only explanation to these facts, as Ella Kesaeva thinks, is that these persons were agents of Russian special services - UBOP and FSB. The confirmation is in their biographies published in the "Novaya Gazeta", she believes.

As she said, the answers to the questions can be given by General Mikhail Pankov, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, and former FSB deputy director General Vladimir Anisimov. They both, Kesaeva notes, were active participants of the counterterrorist operation in Beslan as high-ranking "consultants", and both were also in charge of setting up a secret-service network in the Caucasus. Meanwhile, none of them, despite persistent demands of the victims from the Beslan terror act, have never been subpoenaed for giving evidences.