The head of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating last year's Beslan school siege said yesterday that the regional police department had ignored instructions to strengthen security around schools and accused law enforcement officials of negligence that allowed militants to seize hostages.
Alexander Torshin was summing up the results of the probe so far in the upper house of parliament, while victims' families expressed outrage at a prosecutors' report that exonerated the authorities over the deaths of 331 people in the terrifying hostage-taking.
He said that Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and his deputy had sent telegrams less than two weeks before the militants' raid instructing the regional police department in North Ossetia, where Beslan is located, to beef up security on the first day of school.
PHOTO: AFP
"There was no information about the planning of terror attacks but there was a warning telegram ... on Aug. 21 and 31. In those telegrams, based on intelligence information, there was an order to the Interior Ministry branch in North Ossetia to strengthen protection of all educational facilities on Sept. 1. That could have prevented the terrorist attack. But they weren't fulfilled," Torshin said.
Nearly 16 months have passed since armed Islamic militants seized more than 1,100 pupils, their teachers and parents in the southern Russian town of Beslan, provoking a tense three-day standoff with security forces that ended in a bloodbath.
Torshin blamed police and security officials in North Ossetia and the neighboring region of Ingushetia, from where the militants had launched their raid, for "negligence and carelessness" that allowed the attackers to take hostages.
He criticized authorities' failure to report truthfully on the number of hostages involved -- 1,128.
"The approximate number of hostages became known already in the afternoon of Sept. 1. However, over the course of the next day, officials kept telling of the alleged seizure of 354 hostages," he said.
Survivors have said that the misinformation infuriated the militants, who mocked their hostages by telling them the government wanted to downplay the crisis.
Torshin also assailed the weak coordination between law enforcement agencies.
"Cordons failed to prevent Beslan residents from breaking through to the building and trying to save children and firing on the school," he told lawmakers.
"The counter-terrorist operation was plagued by shortcomings," Torshin said, and added that the current system for preventing terror attacks was inadequate.
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