MOSCOW, 30 July 2005 — Russia reacted angrily yesterday after a US television network broadcast an interview with Shamil Basayev in which the feared Chechen warlord said last year’s Beslan school hostage-taking was carried out in response to the killing of Chechens by Russian troops.
“We take an extremely negative view of this insofar as it gave a public platform to a murderous terrorist,” a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
“It is in this way that terrorists achieve their main goal, through use of the media, to frighten the international community,” the spokesman said.
The Kremlin-backed president of Chechnya, Alu Alkhanov, lashed out at the ABC television network, saying its decision to broadcast the interview smacked of “double standards,” Interfax news agency reported.
“I was stunned that they allowed a man who has openly taken responsibility for dozens of terrorist acts in Russia, who has caused hundreds of civilian victims, to speak with renewed threats against Russia and the Russian people,” Alkhanov said.
Other officials and politicians offered similar condemnation of the broadcast of the interview, which was conducted by a Russian journalist, Andrei Babitsky, well-known for his reporting on the war in Chechnya and which was the first known meeting between Basayev and a journalist in several years.
Basayev had previously claimed responsibility for the Beslan school hostage seizure, but in the interview broadcast on ABC late Thursday in the US and reported widely in Russian media he denied that he or any of the hostage-takers killed children.
“Neither I nor my mujahedin killed children,” the Russian news website gazeta.ru quoted Basayev as saying.
He said the hostage-seizure at the school in Beslan on Sept. 1 last year was carried out “in order to stop the killing of thousands and thousands of Chechen children, Chechen women and elderly people.”
In all, 318 hostages, including 186 children, died when the standoff between gunmen holding more than 1,000 hostages and troops that had surrounded the school erupted in explosions and gunfire for reasons that remain disputed, resulting in the deadliest hostage crisis in memory.
In the interview, Basayev repeated an earlier threat that his supporters fighting Russian rule in Chechnya could stage a similar attack in the future.
“Children are not responsible for this,” he was quoted as saying. “Responsibility lies with the Russian nation as a whole. If the war is not felt by each one of them personally, then it will never end in Chechnya.”
