Bombers' justification: Russians are killing our children, so we are here to kill yours

Chechen website quotes Bible to claim carnage as act of legitimate revenge
A TV image of a man described on Channel One as one of the hostage-takers in Beslan
A TV image of a man described on Channel One as one of the hostage-takers in Beslan. Photograph: AP/Channel One TV
Details began to emerge yesterday as to what may have driven the school siege militants, as yet unidentified, to commit such a horrifying act against children. Witnesses reported that the hostage-takers had attempted to justify their brutality by claiming it was an act of revenge for the killing by Russian forces of Chechen children.

Margarita Komoyeva, a physics teacher released the day before the terrible climax in Beslan, said: "One of them told me: 'Russian soldiers are killing our children in Chechnya, so we are here to kill yours'."

The words were amplified yesterday on a website that is close to Shamil Basayev, the most extreme Chechen commander, whom Russian officials think was the mastermind behind the Beslan atrocity. "However many children in that school were held hostage, however many of them will die (and have already died) ... it is incomparably less than the 42,000 Chechen children of school age, who have been killed by Russian invaders," said the statement on

Dead children, dead adults - brutal murder of more than 250,000 Chechen peaceful civilians by the invaders - all of it cries to heaven and demands retribution. And whoever these 'terrorists' in Beslan might be, their actions are the result of Putin's policies in the Caucasus in response to terrorism and crimes committed by the Kremlin's camarilla, which is still continuing to kill children, flood the Caucasus with blood and poison the world with its deadly bacilli of Russism."

The website quotes the Bible: "What measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you." (This is what Jesus said in The Bible - Matthew 7:2, Mark 4:24, Luke 6:38)."

The Russian deputy prosecutor, Sergei Fridinsky, said last night that 32 rebels took part in the Beslan operation, 30 of whom were killed by Russian forces. Three people have been detained in Beslan, suspected of aiding the attackers.

Russian television showed footage yesterday of an unshaven man, described by a prosecutor as one of the rebels. The state-controlled First Channel television showed him being escorted into a room in handcuffs by masked commandos.

"This man directly took part in the attack, he is a member of the gang," said Mr Fridinsky.

The man, dressed in dirty black shirt, looked and spoke like a native of one of Russia's north Caucasus regions, which include Chechnya and North Ossetia.

"I did not shoot. I swear by Allah I did not shoot," said the man, who looked scared. "I swear by Allah I want to live."

Russian security services said 10 of the rebels were from Arab countries, but did not provide evidence to back up the claim.

The fact that women also took part added another sign of the brutalisation of the Chechen war in the past two years.

According to Dr Cerwyn Moore, a British academic who has been studying the emergence of female suicide bombers, there is a tradition of this sort of raid in Chechen history. "Hostage-taking and blood vendettas are an old phenomenon."

Dr Moore, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, who visited Beslan last week during a study in Russia lasting several months and financed by the British Academy, said it was true that around 60% of the 15 or 20 confirmed suicide bombers had lost husbands.


Others had lost close family members. "When you have a woman who's lost much of her identity because of her husband and family being killed, it's easier for her to be recruited," he said.

But he warned against the notion that every woman who took part in raids was intent on suicide. After the theatre siege in Moscow two years ago, Russian survivors said some of the six women in the group of two dozen men had talked of their eagerness to get home to Chechnya. Some were pregnant.

In that siege the Russian authorities executed all the Chechens when they entered the building after pumping in a powerful knock-out gas. This prevented the truth being known.

It was possible some Chechen women on raids were seeking revenge for being raped by Russian troops. "There has been widespread use of war rape by contract soldiers. The subject is very delicate and hard to get facts on. But when you have Russian contract soldiers looting and raping - and I believe it's the accepted norm - you're going to have things happen later," he said.

Russian claims that women have been drugged by Chechen male fighters as a way of getting them to undertake suicide missions cannot be discounted, but are hard to prove, Dr Moore said.

A Chechen woman who was caught while acting suspiciously with a rucksack containing a bomb used the defence of being drugged at her trial. This could have been a story to try to get off or receive a lighter sentence.

It is even harder to prove Russian claims that Chechen fighters raped Chechen women to reduce their self-esteem and encourage suicide, Dr Moore said, although this too cannot be dismissed out of hand. A decade of war has brutalised almost everybody.

Whatever the motivation, the victimisation of children in a hostage siege marks a new low in depravity.

There were enough parents, teachers, and other adults in the Beslan school on the first day of term for the gunmen and women to have freed the children and keep a large number of hostages as bargaining chips.

Releasing all the children would also have made it easier to get food in for the remaining hostages, and themselves, if the gunmen had more manageable numbers. A day before the final act they had freed 26 people, so they could have let many others go too.

How did the gunmen get so much firepower and explosives?

"Part of the weapons and ammunition were brought in and hidden in advance on the territory of the school where the terrorist act took place - we are carefully looking at this possibility," says Sergei Andreyev, head of the federal security service (FSB) office in the republic of North Ossetia, where the attack occurred.

Several former hostages report that they were forced to dig up the floor at the school to unveil a cache of weapons underneath. This has led to suspicion that they were hidden when the school was remodelled during the summer holidays, possibly even by Chechen workers.

After the siege, the building was also found to have false-fronted walls, once covered in temporary stucco, that were opened by the gunmen to give themselves sheltered firing positions.

Although Mr Fridinsky says the authorities are not connecting the hostage seizure and the school's remodelling, Lev Dzudayev, an aide to the North Ossetian president, said investigators were looking into reports that a Chechen firm may have had the contract to make alterations at the school.