Forensic analysis of the remains of 31 militants who seized a public school in Beslan last month has determined that all of them were dependent on drugs, a senior law enforcement official said in a statement reported on Sunday by Russian news agencies.
The official, Nikolai Shepel, the deputy prosecutor general of Russia's southern federal district, also said that blood tests had found high levels of heroin and morphine among a majority of the attackers who died as the siege ended, "which indicates that they were long-term drug addicts and had been using drugs permanently while preparing for the terrorist attack," according to the Interfax wire service.
As terror attacks have emanated in recent years from the war in Chechnya, many Russian law enforcement officials and politicians have said that those who plan the attacks use hard drugs to coerce suicide bombers or to induce in the bombers a semi-alert state that assists them in fulfilling their grim assignments. Pro-separatist Web sites have dismissed the claims as Russian propaganda.
In an interview last year with the newspaper Vremya Novostei, Akhmad Kadyrov, who later became the president of Chechnya, said that suicide bombers were people "filled with various psychotropic drugs."
Such claims have typically been used to explain the condition of female bombers with tactically simple missions, and not to describe experienced guerrillas, who perform more complicated and long-running tasks.
Shepel said on Sunday that some of the hostage-takers were now believed to have been suffering from withdrawal during the siege.
RSS