MOSCOW, April 17 (AFP) - Over 40 percent of Russians questioned in a recent poll think it likely that the secret services are linked to a wave of bombings that sparked the war in Chechnya, as claimed by exiled media tycoon Boris Berezovsky, Russia's public opinion research center said.
    Six percent of the respondents said they were sure that it was the FSB security service that staged the bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing some 300 people in September 1999.
    Another 37 percent of those questioned in the poll did not exclude the possibility that the accusations, voiced in Berezovsky's recent controversial film, were true even though the FSB's guilt was not proved. However, some 38 percent of the respondents totally denied the charge, the center said, adding that only 16 percent were completely convinced that the bombs were planted by Chechen rebels.
    Some 39 percent of the poll's respondents insisted that the allegations should be thoroughly investigated, while a third of those questioned doubted that the whole truth of the matter could be found.
    In any case, over half of all respondents said that Berezovsky's film should be broadcast on Russia's central television, the center said, adding that most respondents slammed the channels' decision not to screen the film as cowardly.
    The 1999 explosions, for which Chechen separatists were officially blamed, prompted then prime minister Vladimir Putin to send troops into the breakaway republic amid a wave of nationalism that swept him to the presidency half a year later.
    The FSB security service denied Berezovsky's claims, hitting back with accusations that Berezovsky financed an armed incursion of Chechen rebels into the southern Russian republic of Dagestan in August 1999. Berezovsky was a close ally of former president Boris Yeltsin during his rule at the Kremlin, but fell out with Putin and now lives in self-imposed exile in London.

MOSCOW (AP) - A group of lawmakers convened an investigative committee Tuesday to look into the circumstances surrounding a series of still unsolved 1999 apartment bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people and prompted the second Chechen war.
    "We were forced to create a commission like this because the people in power aren't answering the questions put to them by mass media and individual lawmakers," said Sergei Yushenkov, a leader of Russia's Liberal Russia party, which is heading up the investigation.
    Liberal Russia is closely linked to Boris Berezovsky, an exiled business tycoon and critic of President Vladimir Putin. Berezovsky joined the party's leadership last December.
    Berezovsky has accused Russian security services of organizing the apartment bombings and recently financed a documentary film that implied government complicity in the explosions. The Russian tycoon lives abroad in London to avoid prosecution for alleged embezzlement.
    Russian officials blamed the bombings on Chechen rebels, and shortly afterward launched a second invasion of Chechnya. The groundswell of public support for then-Prime Minister Putin during that time played a large role in his election as president.
    Neither the government nor the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, has sanctioned the Liberal Russia investigation, though Yushenkov said support for a wider inquiry is growing in the Duma. He said the committee hoped to hear extensive testimony from witnesses and relatives of those killed in the bombings.

MOSCOW (AP) _ Two former intelligence officers who fled to the West should be tried and sentenced in absentia if they do not return to Russia, Russian Justice Minister Yuri Chaika told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday.
    Law enforcement bodies ''have every reason to bring criminal charges in absentia against former KGB and FSB officers Gen. Oleg Kalugin and Lt. Col. Alexander Litvinenko,'' Chaika was quoted as saying.
    The FSB, or Federal Security Service, is the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.
    Kalugin and Litvinenko were summoned to Russia last week to face an array of charges, but both men said they have no intention of returning.
    Kalugin, who ran the KGB's counterintelligence department from 1973 to 1980, allegedly faces a charge of high treason based, in part, on his testimony against retired U.S. army reserve Col. George Trofimoff, who was convicted last year of spying for the Soviet Union. The FSB has refused to comment on the substance of the case against Kalugin, who lives in the United States. Litvinenko, a former FSB officer who fled to Britain in 2000 and was granted asylum there, faces charges including abuse of office and forgery, Russian news agencies have reported.
    He fell out with his former colleagues at the FSB in 1998, after accusing them of ordering kidnappings, extortion and contract murders, including a plot to kill business tycoon Boris Berezovsky. He also recently co-authored a book that draws attention to a series of 1999 apartment house bombings in Russia, which Berezovsky and other government critics have blamed on the Russian security services.
    The Russian government blamed the bombings on Chechen rebels, and cited the explosions as one of the main reasons for launching the second Chechen war in 1999. Russian officials have suggested that the former agents' trials would likely begin before July, when a new Criminal Code is due to take effect. The new code does not provide for such trials.

Boris Berezovsky's politically charged documentary film about the 1999 apartment bombings was broadcast on television for the second time over the weekend - and once again in a Baltic state.

The 42-minute film, which has been rejected by Russian television channels and was first played on television in Lithuania two weeks ago, aired on Latvia's second-largest network, state-owned LTV-2, on Saturday afternoon.
    "We just decided to show the film to our citizens after Berezovsky's foundation in Latvia offered it to us," LTV news producer Ilse Yaunalksne said by telephone from Riga on Sunday. She was referring to the local branch of Berezovsky's New York-based International Foundation for Civil Liberties.
    Yaunalksne could not say how many people watched the 1:35 p.m. broadcast.
    LTV-2, which broadcasts in Russian, has a market share of about 4 percent, according to the Baltic Media Center ratings agency. Yaunalksne said LTV had notified the Latvian Interior Ministry about the plan to show the film and received a go-ahead. She also said the film was shown as is, without any added commentary before or after the broadcast.
    The film, in which Berezovsky accuses the Federal Security Service of complicity in the deadly apartment bombings, was first presented at a news conference in London last month and then screened at the Sakharov Museum in Moscow.
    It has gotten a muted reception in Russia. No television station has expressed interest in broadcasting the film, and the State Duma recently voted down a suggestion by Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, a member of the Berezovsky-backed Liberal Russia faction, to show the film on state-owned RTR television in a weekly program dedicated to the parliament's activities. The lawmakers also refused to run the film over the Duma's internal television network.

MOSCOW -- A Russian lawmaker with close ties to self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky said members of his party had been assaulted and his own life was under threat.
    Yuli Rybakov, a leader of the Liberal Russia party, said unidentified men beat up three of his employees and attacked a fellow party member. He also said two criminal groups in St. Petersburg had orders to kill him.
    Mr. Rybakov had tried to bring videotapes into Russia of a documentary commissioned by Mr. Berezovsky, who is living abroad to avoid prosecution for alleged embezzlement.
    Mr. Berezovsky, who joined Liberal Russia in December, says the case against him is motivated by his vehement opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The film accused Russian security services of organizing a series of 1999 apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people. Customs officers confiscated the copies Mr. Rybakov was carrying but allowed another parliamentary deputy, Sergei Yushenkov, to bring in some.
    Mr. Rybakov has called on Mr. Putin to form a special government commission to look into the explosions.

CORRECTION: ATTENTION - ADDS details
MOSCOW, March 12 (AFP) - Russian journalists and human rights activists Tuesday watched a controversial documentary film backed by exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky that claims to link Russia's security service to a wave of bombings in 1999 that sparked the war in Chechnya.
    Around 100 people attended the screening held at the office of a Russian human rights organization after all Russian state-dominated television networks declined last week to air the 45-minute documentary.
    Entitled in English "Assassination of Russia", the film, clips of which were screened earlier this month in London, accuses the FSB, the successor of the Soviet-era KGB secret police, of planting bombs in Moscow and the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk which killed some 300 people in September 1999 and were blamed on Chechen separatists.
    The documentary draws on large segments of another film aired in 1999 and 2000 by the television channel NTV which was later taken over by state-dominated gas giant Gazprom.
    Sergei Yushenkov, a deputy with the Berezovsky-backed Liberal Russia party and one of the organizers of the screening, admitted the documentary offered no definitive evidence but said it still raised essential questions.
    "This film is not a verdict in the legal sense of the word, but it raises the issue (of the responsibility for the bombings) and makes it essential to look for the truth," he said.
    Yushenkov said his party planned to set up an independent commission to forge ahead with the enquiry, and intended to make the results available to Russia's general prosecutor.
    There was no reaction from the Kremlin following the screening. Berezovsky has claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former FSB chief and prime minister at the time, knew about the security services' part in the bombing campaign.
    The 1999 explosions prompted Putin to send troops into breakaway Chechnya amid a wave of nationalist fervour that swept him to the presidency just six months later.
    The documentary provides new accounts of the bombings by a Russo- American historian, Yury Felshtinsky, who wrote a book about the attacks, as well as by several Russian journalists.
    The film aims mainly to point out contradictions in the FSB's explanations for the wave of blasts.
    It devotes particular attention to a failed bombing attempt that was discovered in Ryazan, in the Volga region, just a few days after the Moscow and Volgodonsk blasts.
    Police raiding the basement of an apartment block in Ryazan discovered and defused several bombs containing the same explosive that was used in Moscow and Volgodonsk.
    Two days later, embarrassed local FSB officials said the incident had been an exercise aimed at testing local residents' vigilance in the face of a terrorist threat.
    The film demonstrates how officials consistently contradicted each other, with the local FSB chief saying that absolutely nothing had been discovered in the block's basement, while FSB head Nikolai Patrushev claimed that suspect bags had been discovered but that they only contained sugar.
    Patrushev's explanations were received with widespread scepticism at the time, notably by the residents of the apartment block concerned.
    Quoting witnesses and Russian intelligence experts, the film suggests that the FSB sent agents from Moscow to carry out a bombing in Ryazan.
    In particular it presents a telephone company employee who claims that she overheard a phone call between the FSB's infamous Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow and a correspondent in Ryazan advising intelligence officers there to leave the Volga city "one after the other."

Mention Chechnya and human rights in the same sentence and it is often said that Vladimir Putin comes unhinged. The Chechens are terrorists, the Russian army is behaving itself, the war is winnable. There is no Chechen problem. But like a rich uncle who was generous at a crucial time but ever after demands favors in return, the Russian president's dubious political beginnings continue to extract a price.

]Mr. Putin was born -- politically speaking -- in Chechnya. The first war in Chechnya was a military and political disaster, nearly costing Boris Yeltsin his job. Russia withdrew in defeat in 1996.

When Russian troops returned to Chechnya in September 1999, having been driven out three years earlier, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was an obscure official, a career spy plucked seemingly out of nowhere by President Boris Yeltsin to be his successor. A spate of apartment bombings around Russia, killing nearly 300 Russian civilians and injuring more than 550, was blamed on Chechen terrorists. Mr. Putin vowed to make Russia safe again and root out the Chechen threat once and for all. Their defeat, he pledged, would be swift.

But the Russian army remains mired in an unwinnable campaign against a war-hardened, destitute people who have nothing to lose by continuing to repel a hegemon that has caused them mostly suffering since Stalin's time.

There are two reasons for recalling this history now. First, the annual State Department human-rights report out this week is a reminder that at a time when Slobodan Milosevic is on trial in The Hague for war crimes, Russian forces in the breakaway republic continue to behave deplorably. According to the State Department, Russians in Chechnya have "demonstrated little respect for basic human rights." The State Department cites "credible reports" of torture, extortion and killings by Russian troops.

The Kremlin dismisses the charges as politically motivated. Russia's foreign ministry issued a statement yesterday blaming the criticism on "certain circles in the U.S. . . . who oppose the constructive development in Russian-American relations."

Then there is the lurking question of the pretext for the second war in Chechnya -- the apartment bombings. This was Russia's Oklahoma City, except the death toll was higher and the bombing got a war started and changed the course of Russian politics by determining beyond question who would be the country's president for a while to come.

But there are other differences from Oklahoma City -- the main one being that we still don't know who did it. The Kremlin has always blamed "Chechen terrorists." Some presumed culprits were arrested and a trial closed to the public conducted. But it turned out not to have anything to do with the bombings themselves. There are still no answers.

Now the controversial self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky has fulfilled his threat to release evidence that the attacks were orchestrated not by Chechens but by Mr. Putin's own Federal Security Services. Mr. Berezovsky doesn't accuse Vladimir Putin of ordering the attacks but says he must have known "such things" were taking place. "The FSB thought that Putin would not be able to come to power through lawful democratic means," he theorized at a press conference Tuesday.

The "evidence" turns out to be not so much a smoking gun as a catalogue of suspicious circumstances that raise reasonable doubt. For the uninitiated it must be said that Boris Berezovsky is not known as a great defender of democratic values. Whether fairly or not, his wealth is often attributed to his close ties to the Yeltsin family during the 1990s. He left Russia to escape corruption charges (which he says are politically motivated). There is not much mutual fondness between Mr. Berezovsky and Yeltsin's successor, Mr. Putin.

But Mr. Berezovsky is by no means the only one to have suspected the 1999 bombings might have been an inside job. The theory has been around for years. The circumstantial evidence centers around the one bomb attack that didn't come off -- on Sept. 22, 1999, in Ryazan, 125 miles southeast of Moscow.

Bags of white stuff with a detonator were found there by local police following a tip from a suspicious resident. The FSB claimed that it was simply a prop in a training exercise, nothing more than sugar and a fake detonator. Local police experts on the scene differed with this account but have apparently since come under pressure to hold their tongues. Mr. Berezovsky produces other supposed pieces to the puzzle, but Ryazan -- foiled FSB attack or bizarre training exercise? -- is the most intriguing.

The idea of a state security service committing mass murder would seem too ludicrous to be entertained until you remember that the FSB was the renamed KGB, whose raison d'etre for decades was basically institutionalized terror in the service of the Communist Party. It is not entirely unfathomable that some cell of the FSB might have done something truly horrific.

What gives these allegations legs is not that the bombings provided the pretext for a war that helped elect a president. It is that the most horrific crime of the post-Soviet era has not been solved and authorities seem to have lost interest. The Duma twice voted down proposals for an independent investigation . The public has been kept in the dark about who or what might have caused so much fear. It would be as if the American government dropped the ball after Oklahoma, failed to catch Timothy McVeigh and then shrugged its shoulders two years later.

Could the bombers strike again? Nobody knows. But questions about those attacks, like Russia's conduct in Chechnya, continue to follow Mr. Putin like a shadow.

24 November 2000.

John Sweeney works for The Observer newspaper and has visited Chechnya twice this year. He has won an Emmy and a British Journalist of the Year. E-mail: john.sweeney@observer.co.uk
This report was written for Cryptome. Responses, critiques and additional evidence welcomed, especially from Russia and Chechnya: anonymous contributions invited. Send-to information at cryptome.org.

Cryptome November 24, 2000

John Sweeney on the evidence that the old KGB deliberately planted bombs in Moscow and blamed them on Chechen terrorists.

The critical evidence are these photographs of a detonator. The photographs of a detonator, taken by a Russian bomb squad, and other fresh evidence point to a plot carried out by the FSB working to assist their old spymaster, Vladimir Putin, in his rise to control the world’s number two superpower and its nuclear arsenal.

[The photos can be found at and ]

The secret policeman stood on the edge of a field of rubble and burnt wreckage, the ruins of what had been only the night before a block of flats.

He looked Central Casting’s idea of a KGB operative, sporting a cowpat hairdo, a cheap black raincoat, black tie, lean, tall, clean shaven, saturnine. They call the KGB the FSB these days, a new name for the Soviet state’s old organ of terror.

There had been two bombs in Moscow in four days. The first bomb exploded just after midnight at a block of flats at Guryanov Street. It killed 92 Muscovites sleeping in their beds in the early morning of 9th September, 1999. Several bodies were rocketed into the surrounding streets. By daybreak people could see the sad detritus of the atrocity: children’s clothes, a sofa hanging off a ledge in what had been someone’s living room, open to the sky, books, pictures scattered far and wide. Broken glass crackled underfoot in all the surrounding streets. The edge of fear in Moscow was tangible.

Four days later the second bomb blew up a similar block of flats at Kashirskoye Highway at five in the morning. The wounded, shocked, painted in dust, as semi-naked as when they went to sleep, a night and a lifetime ago, were carried off in stretchers. The most haunting image was of a man quite blackened by soot from a fire, crawling on his hands and knees through the wreckage: more beast than man. He survived. 130 other residents in the block of flats - men, women, children - did not.

Enter the secret policeman. He walked up to the TV cameras and presented to the compound eye of lenses a black and white e-fit picture. The e-fit depicted a Chechen man, with a fleshy face, almost Buddha-like in its plumpness, swarthy skin and tinted spectacles. This was the Chechen terrorist the authorities were blaming for the bomb. He was using the name of Mukhit Laipanov, who had recently rented ground floor space in the two apartment blocks devastated by the bombs. The real Laipanov died in a car crash earlier in 1999. The authorities were very quick to pin the blame on a group of Chechen trained terrorists. It was the Chechens who did it - that was the instant effect of the secret policeman’s e-fit. It was posted up all around the bus stops of Moscow. The Russian authorities have yet to produce a single solid piece of evidence to support their theory that Chechen terrorists blew up Moscow. No-one has been tried, no chain of evidence explained. A few men have been arrested, but none of the alleged ‘ring-leaders’. Three days after the second bomb, the bulldozers moved in, obliterating the sites and also destroying evidence against the bombers.

Two more bombs had exploded in cities in southern Russia. The four bombs together killed more than 300 people in less than two weeks.

There was a fifth bomb. This one didn’t go off. But the fifth bomb - proved by photographs of its detonator shown above - provides hard evidence that challenges the official ‘Chechen version’ of the Moscow bomb outrages. The fifth bomb points the other way: that the KGB-FSB bombed Moscow deliberately to blacken the name of the Chechens as a pretext for the second Chechen war.

The photographs of a detonator, taken by a Russian bomb squad, and other fresh evidence point to a plot carried out by the FSB working to assist their old spymaster, Vladimir Putin, in his rise to control the world’s number two superpower and its nuclear arsenal.

When the two Moscow bombs went off, Putin had just been appointed prime minister by President Yeltsin. With no public track record, the former secret policeman was widely mocked as a political nobody, a cold, faceless Kremlin insider who had spent 16 years in the KGB and had emerged as the chief of its successor, the FSB. Boris Kagarlitsky is a seasoned Kremlin watcher in Moscow: ‘You cannot turn a bureaucrat into a glamorous person. He is as grey as he used to be. There is a propaganda machine which works but that is exactly the weakness of Putin, because as a politician he is a nobody. To be a politician you need some kind of past.’

Matt Ivens, editor of the Moscow Times, thought the same: ‘Yeltsin had been through a couple of prime ministers and each time he dropped them he made it clear that it had something to do with elections.

By the end he's picking Vladimir Putin. No one has ever heard of Putin, except very careful watchers of politics or people from St. Petersberg. He's announcing "this is my successor, this is a man who can run the country" and there is widespread ridicule. All the newspapers in town including ours said, there's no way this guy could win an election, unless something really extraordinary is going to happen.’

The Moscow bombs were the extraordinary thing

Putin struck out in the immediate aftermath of the bombs: ‘Those that have done this don't deserve to be called animals. They are worse ... they are mad beasts and they should be treated as such.’

His poll ratings soared, and he struck again: ‘we will waste them. Even when they are on the bog.’ This was pure gangsterese, but it went down a treat with the Russian public. Putin was working with the grain of Russian racism. For centuries, the Muslim renegades from the savage rocks of the Caucases have been the folk devils of Russia. The nineteenth century poet Lermontov wrote a lullaby which has stuck in the Russian mind:

‘The Terek streams over boulders, the murky waves splash;
a wicked Chechen crawls on to the bank and sharpens his kinzhal;
But your father is an old warrior forged in battle;
sleep my darling, be calm, sing lullaby.’

The Chechens had humiliated the might of Russia in the first Chechen War, which Yeltsin had started in a drunken rage in 1994. They had kidnapped and killed mnay Russian soldiers, sometimes in a bloody and disgusting fashion.

The Islamic terror

Now it was the turn of the old guard, the Russian military and the FSB, to get their own back. And the Chechens were wasted, Grozny mulched to rubble, again, their economy annihilated, their ecology destroyed, their men shot and tortured and dumped in pits - to this day.

The tanks started to roll, and the war in Chechnya which has seen a Russian victory at the expense of thousands of civilian lives, began.

Putin’s brisk, savage reaction to the Moscow bombs made him a Russian superstar. The Chechens lost everything they had gained from the first war. One Chechen view is this: ‘if we had wanted to bomb Moscow, we would have blown up the Kremlin or a nuclear power station. Why should we blow up a couple of blocks of flats?’ Putin’s tough guy stance saw his opinion poll ratings rocket from close to zero to 70 per cent. Hugely popular, he was anointed President of the Russian Federation by Boris Yeltsin on New’s Year Eve. Sick, drunk, a joke but not a funny one, Yeltsin bowed out, escaping a fraud and money-laundering investigation by the Swiss Chief Prosecutor which was getting very close to his ‘family’ in the Kremlin.

Earlier in 1999 Special Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov had been hot on Yeltsin's case. He had received damning evidence from the Swiss investigators, evidence that put Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatiana, directly in the frame. Then he got a phone call. ‘We’ve got you on tape. Resign, or you’re finished.’

Skuratov refused to be blackmailed - and then Russia's TV millions saw him being entertained by two young prostitutes. They saw their Special Prosecutor lying on his back, naked, one of the woman on top of him, her head bobbing up and down. It was a classic dirty trick.

And the man responsible? Skuratov said: ‘As head of the FSB, Putin was one of those who fought against me, who compromised me, who plotted to get me off the case.’

The shaming of Skuratov finished off the Special Prosecutor, but not the case. By August 1999, the evidence against Yeltsin and his family was growing. It centred around an expensive refurbishment of the Kremlin, the central allegation being that a Swiss businessman of Albanian origin had supplied credit cards to members of Yeltsin’s circle in return for the contract. Worse, the evidence was in Swiss, not Russian, hands. Yeltsin’s popularity rating was hitting 2 per cent. At that point he promoted his spy chief, Putin, and made him prime minister.

At the same time Russian TV showing a video of clip of Chechen guerrillas purportedly torturing and killing Russian soldiers. The worst clip shows a knife being put to the neck of a shaven-headed white man. Then his artery is severed and one can see his blood drain from his face in close-up. The next shot is of the man lying prone on the ground, to all intents and purposes a corpse. There is no way of telling whether the victim was a Russian soldier and the killers Chechen, no supporting evidence. Nevertheless, this and other clips were shown on Russian TV repeatedly - as if someone in authority was minded to soften Russian public opinion against the Chechens. And this happened before the bomb outrages.

The first came in the southern city of Buinaksk, killing 62 in September 4th, 1999. Then came the two bombs in Moscow, then a fourth that killed 17 in the southern city of Volgodonsk on September 16th.

The Russian government’s case that Chechen terrorists or Chechen-backed terrorists bombed Moscow and the two towns in southern Russia was spelt out by Vladimir Kozlov, head of the FSB’s anti-terrorism department, in a Moscow press conference a year after the outrages. Kozlov said that the terrorists were members of a radical Islamic sect, led by one Achemez Gochiyayev, who was paid $500,000 by the feared Chechen warlord Khattab. He recruited Yusuf Krymshamkhalov and Denis Saitakov to deliver the Moscow blasts. None of these men have been arrested. But two other men have been: Taukan Frantsuzov and Ruslan Magayayev. The evidence against them, when or if it comes before the courts, is keenly awaited.

The terrorists were trained in Chechnya, then dispatched to neighbouring North Caucasian republics, such as Karachayevo-Cherkassia, with tons of explosives, said the FSB. There, they rented trucks and smuggled the explosives to Moscow, usually camouflaged as sugar, potatoes or some other produce. Most of the bombs were made of a mixture of potassium nitrate and aluminium powder, with Casio watches used as timers, according to Kozlov. FSB detectives say they also found 500 kilograms of this mixture near the Chechen city of Urus-Martan in December, 1999, citing this as proof that those responsible for the attacks were not only trained in Khattab’s camps in Chechnya, but also obtained explosives there.

Common sense says it would be madness for a group of Chechens to smuggle explosives all the way from Urus-Martan to Moscow. Since the first Chechen war, Chechens are routinely singled out for harrassment by Russian police, vehicles stopped and searched, identity papers demanded. Besides, there has long been a strong Chechen mafia in Moscow, very capable of getting its own hands on arms or explosives locally. In Russia, you can bribe your way into a nuclear rocket silo or buy the list of the lost sailors of the doomed submarine, the Kursk. The ‘Chechen terrorists’ would have been risking a great deal by hauling their explosives roughly 1,000 miles to Moscow, when they could have bought them locally.

Six of the suspects, including those for the bombs in southern Russia, have been killed in fighting with federal forces in southern Russia. Dead men don’t tell tales. Much of the evidence presented at the FSB news conference was circumstantial.

But the FSB’s official version of the bomb outrages starts to fall apart when you examine the case of the fifth bomb. The story of its discovery, defusal and denial casts huge doubts on the Kremlin’s line.

Around 9pm at night on 22 September in the provincial city of Ryazan, 100 miles south east of Moscow, Vladimir Vasiliev, an engineer coming home for the night noticed three strangers acting suspiciously by the basement of his block of flats at 14/16 Novosyolov Street, literally New Settlers Street. Vasiliev said: ‘A white was parked outside the entrance, with the boot towards the entrance. In the car were two men, young men, also young, about 20 or 25 years old.’

Vasiliev noticed that the last two digits of the car number plate had been stuck on with paper, showing 62, the Ryazan regional code. Underneath the paper was the true plate number, giving a Moscow code. Vasiliev, puzzled, decided to call the police. ‘As we were waiting for the lift and it was empty, one of the young guys got out of the car and the girl asked: "have you done everything?" "Yes." "OK, let’s go." And they got into the car and quite quickly left.’

Vasiliev observed the three in the car with the mismatched plates. ‘I remember the driver sat at the wheel, quite thin, with a moustache, and the other man was heavier. The girl had blond hair, cut short, wearing sports clothes and a leather jacket. They were Russian, absolutely, not Asiatic.’

The police arrived. Inspector Andrei Chernyshev from the local police was the first to enter the basement. He said: ‘we had a signal from a man on duty. It was about 10 in the evening. There were some strangers who were seen leaving the basement from the Building 14/16 at Novosyolovo Street. We were met by the girl who stood by the building. She told us about the men who came out from the basement and left with the car with a licence number which was covered with paper. I went down to the basement. This block of flats had a very deep basement which was completely covered with water. We could see sacks of sugar and in them some electronic device, a few wires and a clock. We were shocked. We ran out of the basement and I stayed on watch by the entrance and my officers went to evacuate the people.’

Grandmother Clara Stepanovna recalled that night: ‘the neighbours began to knock at the door and said: "get out fast, something’s been planted underneath us." We quickly grabbed what we could and leapt out. My daughter leaped out not dressed, without stockings, without tights, not anything, just flung a jacket on. The kids also dashed out not dressed. They held us away from the block of flats and started investigating. They didn’t give us permission to come near.’

Vasiliev said: ‘After we were standing in the square, my wife remembered that she hadn’t switched off the stove, so I went up to an MVD officer to tell him. We went up in the lift. He told me they had really had found a device.’ (MVD stands for Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del, the Interior Ministry.)

Yuri Tkachenko, head of the local bomb squad, went down into the basement. ‘For me it was a live bomb. I was in a combat situation,’ he said. He tested the three sugar sacks in the basement with his MO-2 portable gas analyser, and got a positive reading for Hexogen, the explosive used in the Moscow bombs.

The timer of the detonator was set for 5.30am, which would have killed many of the 250 tenants of the 13-storey block of flats.

The sacks were taken out of the basement at around 1.30 in the morning and driven away by the FSB. But the secret police left the detonator in the hands of the bomb squad. They photographed it later that day.

As the residents were finally allowed back into to their homes at seven in the morning, one of the policemen let Mrs Stepanovna see what was left. She said: ‘there was a bit left, and the policeman said: "there, that’s it. That’s the stuff that was meant to blow you up.’

The local police arrested two men that night, according to Boris Kagarlitsky, a member of the Russian Institute of Comparative Politics. ‘FSB officers were caught red-handed while planting the bomb. They were arrested by the police and they tried to save themselves by showing FSB identity cards.’

Then, headquarters of the FSB in Moscow intervened. The two men were quietly let go.

The next day, on September 24, the FSB in Moscow announced that there had never been a bomb, only a training exercise. There was no hexogen, only sugar. Pro-Kremlin newspapers reported that the Ryazan bomb squad had made a mistake when they detected hexogen. One newspaper commented that perhaps they hadn’t washed their tester, a remark to which Tkachenko the bomb disposal expert replied: ‘it wasn’t an enema. There are two sources of radiation in the tester. These people don’t know what they are talking about.

Alexander Sergeyev, head of the Ryazan regional FSB, said, when asked about the training exercise: ‘the decision wasn’t taken by our local FSB. If it was a training exercise, it was done for everyone to check the combat readiness of all the towns in Russia. Nobody told us it was a training exercise and we didn’t receive a call that it was over. For two days and nights, we didn’t receive any documents or order that it was finished.’

Officially, the Minister of Interior has forbidden the police and the FSB from talking about the bomb that never was. But few believe the Kremlin’s version that it was only a training exercise.

Vasiliev said: ‘I heard the official version on the radio, when the press secretary of the FSB announced that it was a training exercise. It felt extremely unpleasant. A lot of neighbours started to call me and say: "did you hear that?" I heard it, but I cannot believe it.’

The credibility of the FSB version of events hangs on the notion of a training exercise. Why use real hexogen and a real detonator in a dummy bomb? If was just a training exercise, why turn out the residents of the block of flats for a sleepless night? And why should the Ryazan bomb squad be so concerned about a dummy detonator that they took a photograph of it?

The concern of locals deepened when the newspaper Novaya Gazeta alleged that sacks of hexogen were found at a military base in Ryazan. The paper reported that a paratrooper on guards duty at a weapons warehouse outside the city discovered piles of sacks labelled sugar. He opened one of the bags and tried to use the white powder to sweeten his tea, only to recoil at the taste. An explosives expert called in to examine the bags declared that they contained hexogen.

Putin has declared: ‘there is nobody in the Russian special services capable of committing such a crime against our people. It is immoral even to consider such a possibility. In fact, this is nothing but an element of the information war against Russia.’

His problem is that the residents of the Ryazan block of flats, among others, do not believe his word or the word of the FSB on the matter.

Copyright 2000 John Sweeney.

No limits on reproduction or distribution. Credit John Sweeney; and Cryptome if you like but not required.

25 November 2000

Los Angeles Times
Saturday, January 15, 2000
By MAURA REYNOLDS, Times Staff Writer

RYAZAN, Russia--On a chilly night last September, bus driver Alexei Kartofelnikov saw a suspicious car parked outside the 13-story apartment building where he lives in this working-class city. He called the police, who discovered three sacks of powder and a timing device in the basement.
    The sacks tested positive for explosives. The building's residents were evacuated and, haunted by the knowledge that 300 sleeping Russians had been killed in recent weeks in a wave of early-morning apartment bombings, spent the night dozing fitfully in a nearby movie theater.
    Late the next day, security officials in Moscow, about 100 miles away, announced that it had all been a civil defense drill. The sacks, they said, contained nothing but sugar.
    Since then, Kartofelnikov and the other residents have kept asking themselves: Was it really just an exercise to test their vigilance? Or were they nearly the next victims of the bombers--whoever they might be?
    The government has yet to find the bombers. Security officials insist the culprits are linked to fighters in the separatist republic of Chechnya but have produced no conclusive evidence. For the most part, Russians buy the explanation: They have little love for the rebellious Chechens and believe that their new war against them is just payback to the "terrorists."
    But some Russians fear that the truth is darker, and the 250 residents of Kartofelnikov's building are among them. At a minimum, they believe that the government is covering up something. At a maximum, they fear that the government might itself have played a role in the bombings.
    Kartofelnikov, 47, considers himself a sensible man. He is not prone to suspicions or conspiracy theories. He tends to give people the benefit of the doubt. But at this point, he has too much doubt.
    "Somebody tried to blow us up," he says. "I have no doubt about that. But as for who did it, or why--I don't know what to think."
    But he does know what came next. The government, citing the attacks, went to war against Chechnya.
    "The government started bombing Chechnya the next day," Kartofelnikov says quietly. "I know Chechens. I served with them in the army. They are good people. How can one suspect them of such a thing? How can one suspect it of anybody?"
    Ivan Kirilin, a scrappy 67-year-old who talks through a cigarette, also has his suspicions.
    "Who should I believe--what the government says or what was in the basement?" he says. "I don't think the Chechens would blow up a residential house. You have to ask--who is responsible for the war? Who needed the war? The government, of course."

Government Moves to Quell Questions
Questions of government complicity in the bombing campaign are persistent enough that the Kremlin has taken steps to quash them. Just this week, the government's war press center released a video purporting to show a bomb-making factory in the Chechen town of Urus-Martan that security officials say manufactured the bombs.
    The video showed sacks of chemicals that government investigators identified as ammonium nitrate, which they said was used in the Moscow bombs. The investigators also said they found instruction booklets from Casio watches that were used as the bombs' timing devices.
    The government explanations have a polemic tone--lots of generalization, few specifics. And they beg the question: Even if the Moscow bombs were made in Urus-Martan, who ordered them in the first place?
    In Ryazan, the government's assertions have made little headway against residents' suspicions. There are too many details that don't fit. And there's the undeniable fact that the bombings led to the war, and the war fed the rise of Vladimir V. Putin.
    Putin was head of the KGB's main successor agency, the FSB, until just a few weeks before the bombings. He is now prime minister and acting president, and nothing appears to stand in the way of his becoming president in an election in March.
    "The authorities are trying hard to hush it up and hide everything," says Tatiana Borycheva, 45. "I don't believe the Chechens were behind it. I think it's a big political game. People are fighting for power, and our lives are not worth a kopeck in their game. I think somebody wanted to set up the Chechens to start the war and grab power."
    Nearly four months after the bomb scare, residents keep reviewing the sequence of events, seeking some kind of answers to their questions.
    Kartofelnikov was returning home about 9:10 p.m. when he noticed an ordinary Russian Zhiguli automobile parked next to his building's entrance. The car had an unusual license plate number, however--as a professional driver, Kartofelnikov tends to notice such things. And when he got closer, he realized it was more than unusual--the last two numbers, which in Russia indicate the city in which the car is registered, had been pasted over with a hand-drawn piece of paper. The glued-on number was 62, for Ryazan. Underneath, he could see the real number--77, for Moscow.
    At the time, the country was in near-hysteria over the bombing campaign, in which five bombs had wreaked havoc in three cities. Authorities had urged citizens to report suspicious activities near their homes.
    So Kartofelnikov called the police. A few minutes later, so did Vladimir Vasiliev, a 53-year-old radio engineer, who not only saw the Zhiguli and the pasted-on license numbers but got a look at the people inside before it pulled away. There were two men and a woman, he says. They looked not like Chechens, who tend to be darker-skinned, but like Russians.
    Still, Vasiliev wasn't taking any chances. After all, the building had many of the same characteristics as the apartment houses in Moscow. It was tall, with a single entrance, a store on the first floor, little security and open access to the basement.
    By 9:20, the police were on their way. The car was gone by the time they arrived. They went straight to the basement and found the sacks of white powder and the timing device. The bomb squad did a quick test and detected explosive vapors.
    "Our preliminary tests showed the presence of explosives," says Lt. Col. Sergei Kabashov, chief of the local police precinct. "We weren't told it was a test. As far as we were concerned, the danger was real."
    The local branch of the FSB was also in the dark.
    "We were not informed about the exercise in advance, and that's why we acted in full and by the book," says Yuri V. Bludov, spokesman for the security agency's Ryazan regional office.
    The building was evacuated, with the exception of five invalids who could not be moved. Investigators from the police, the FSB and the federal Emergencies Ministry combed the building for more explosives. The residents were permitted to return to their apartments at 7 a.m. The timing device on the sacks had reportedly been set for 5:30 a.m.--the same time that the Moscow bombs had gone off.

Telltale Traces of Powder Disappear
Vasiliev, the radio engineer, watched the police load the sacks into the back of a police car. He says that they looked like ordinary 100-pound bags of sugar and that some of the white powder fell on the ground. But when a resident who works in a chemical lab went to take a sample the next day, the spill had been cleaned up.
    It was late the next day, during the evening news, that FSB chief Nikolai P. Patrushev announced that the bomb scare had been just a drill. Nearly 24 hours had passed.
    "Of course no investigation is going on now in relation to this case. It was just an exercise," says Bludov, the FSB spokesman in Ryazan.
    Without an investigation to probe further, residents will keep asking themselves the same questions:
    * If it really was a test, why did the authorities wait nearly 24 hours to say so?
    * Who was being tested? The residents? The local police? The local FSB?
    * Why haven't there been reports of tests in other cities?
    And then there are larger questions concerning the overall bombing campaign:
    * Why would Chechen terrorists kill defenseless civilians in anonymous apartment buildings instead of choosing public targets like train stations or government buildings?
    * Why has there been no credible claim of responsibility? Chechen authorities have denied any involvement by the separatists.
    * Why were the remains of the Moscow buildings razed so quickly?
    In the days after the Ryazan incident, the local FSB chief came to speak to the apartment building's residents. He apologized but told them that filing a suit for damages would probably lead nowhere.
    So the residents asked for--and got--a new entranceway of heavy white brick, with an intercom security system. And they haven't filed a suit or a formal complaint.
    "The general opinion is that we'd better not challenge them or they will really blow us up next time," says Tatiana Lukichyova, 51.
    Vasiliev would like to forget the whole thing: He can't believe that it was just an exercise, but he doesn't like the line of thought that follows.
    "We have been manipulated. But by whom, and for what purpose, I can't say," he says. "I'm afraid we'll never know what really happened."