MOSCOW, 7 September 2004 — Security forces bungled the handling of Russia’s worst hostage drama because nobody was in charge and special forces were not ready when the shooting started, security analysts said yesterday.
“It’s clear that it was a total mess,” leading military analyst Alexander Golts told Reuters. “They were not prepared.”
As the death toll from the battle that ended the siege in the North Ossetian town of Beslan rose above 330, Russia’s media asked how the vaunted special forces had allowed a two-day standoff to turn into a bloodbath.
Authorities said they were forced to storm the school when the militants fired on hostages who were fleeing in the confusion following two explosions. With no security cordon to keep them back, armed local people pressed forward and were among the first to return fire.
Local troops — unprepared and possibly short of ammunition — suddenly found themselves assaulting the school, while special forces moved in only half an hour after the battle began, Golts said.
The newspaper Vremya Novostei said that when the fighting started, two special forces squads from the FSB security service were still discussing assault plans and had not even agreed on approach routes or where the defenders’ firing points were.
It said the two squads, Alfa and Vympel - equivalent to Britain’s Special Air Service or the US Delta Force - suffered unprecedented casualties totaling 10 dead and up to 31 wounded. Security expert Andrei Soldatov said on Ekho Moskvy radio that the battle began so suddenly that many of the special forces fought without bullet-proof vests.
But local troops were also too close to the school, keen to show the media the scene and avoid the accusations of a cover-up that plagued the Russian government in a previous hostage crisis, the capture of a Moscow theatre in 2002, he said. The disastrous handling of the siege earned a rebuke for the security forces from President Vladimir Putin, himself a former agent in the KGB, the FSB’s Soviet forerunner.
“We have to admit we showed no understanding of the danger of processes occurring in our own country and in the world at large,” he said in a televised address on Saturday. “We failed to react appropriately to them and, instead, showed weakness.”
Meanwhile, grief-stricken mothers and fathers trudged through mud and rain yesterday to bury children slaughtered in the school siege. In Beslan, authorities took over land the size of a soccer pitch next to the cemetery to find room to bury the dead.
Mourners in black bore dozens of open coffins filled with flowers, their wails sometimes drowned out by the drone of mechanical diggers excavating yet more graves. A mother and her two children shared one grave. “I feel terrible. I had a sister here who died. My other sister is in hospital. What can I feel? Do you hear people crying? That’s how I feel,” said Beslan resident Rustan on the first of two days of national mourning.
Troops have tightened security at North Ossetia’s boundaries with other regions in case fury over the carnage should stoke tensions in the Caucasus region of southern Russia.
But there has been anger too at the chaotic storming of the school by Russian troops and at President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Russia was the victim of “international terror” rather than homegrown Chechen extremists.
