As the sole trial of an alleged hostage-taker captured in the Beslan school siege opened Tuesday, several Beslan residents insisted many hostages were in fact killed by the Russian special forces who were supposed to free them.
They say the special forces used flame-throwers and rocket launchers against the school as hostages were still inside, contrary to the official version.
And they say they can prove it.
PHOTO: AP
Officially, many of the 330 people, more than half of them children, who died in the attack last September were killed by powerful explosives the hostage-takers detonated inside the school.
But the editor of a local newspaper, Murad Kabuyev, and many Beslan residents argue that their own inquiry into the circumstances of the assault carried out by Russian forces on Sept 3 last year shows very different results.
"We know flame-throwers were used before the evacuation" of the school, says Kabuyev, a respected journalist who received an award from the Russian Journalists Union for his work on the Beslan tragedy.
He says he can display two exhibits to prove this -- a flame thrower and a rocket launcher residents found near the school.
"We know the special forces set them up on the roof of a house facing the school as early as Sept. 2. Witnesses saw them," Kabuyev says.
Kabuyev and several residents have founded an association called the Initiative Group for the Submission of Evidence to the Forces of Law and Order.
The Initiative Group demands a second inquiry into the way the special forces stormed the Beslan school. And Kabuyev says that "so far, it has not been established that two bombs went off inside the [school] gymnasium" where the hostage-takers kept their captives.
In April, the group convinced the prosecutor's office to register the flame-thrower and the rocket launcher as official exhibits.
Kabuyev sees this as a first victory and insists the group's efforts have brought about a change in the official version, which had initially denied the special forces had ever used the flame-thrower.
"We handed the exhibits to the prosecutor's office on April 4," Kabuyev says.
"At first, the prosecutor insisted that they belonged to the terrorists and he would not hear anything about the fact that they had been used by the special forces. But thanks to our efforts, his office now admits this," he says.
However, Kabuyev's optimism may be a little bit premature.
While a spokesman for the prosecutor's office did confirm his services had registered the exhibits, he ruled out the possibility that they might have been used against the hostages.
"The inquiry has established that [the weapons] were used only after the hostages were evacuated" from the school, Sergei Prokapov told reporters.
"The flame-thrower and the rocket launcher were only used around 6:00pm [on Sept 3], when all hostages had been evacuated," he said. There are no testimonies or facts contradicting this."
But the Initiative Group says it has gathered precisely such testimonies, including that of Lyudmila Dzgoyeva, who was a hostage with her two daughters, one of whom was killed.
"The explosives hung up [in the school's gymnasium by the hostage-takers] did not go off," says Dzgoyeva, 33, who, like Kabuyev, is attending the trial in Vladikavkaz.
"Just before the explosion, I saw a light outside through one of the gymnasium's windows," which could have come from a flame thrower or a grenade launcher, she says. As he attends the trial, Kabuyev notes that the lawyers of the victims' families often state that the bodies of many hostages killed were burned.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the