Russian Rebels Had Precise Plan

By C. J. Shivers and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 6 September 2004

The attackers wore NATO-issued camouflage. They carried gas masks, compasses and first-aid kits. They communicated with hand-held radios, and brought along two sentry dogs, as expertly trained as the attackers themselves, the officials said. All suggested detailed planning, including surveillance and possibly rehearsals, the officials said.

BESLAN, Russia, Sept. 5—Inside the charred, bullet-pocked wreckage of Middle School No. 1, there lies evidence of the terror Russia faces: Two parts of the library's wooden floor had been pried up, evidently by the heavily armed attackers who seized the school last week and held more than 1,100 hostages for 52 hours.

Beneath the boards, investigators now suspect, the attackers had secreted a cache of weapons or other equipment weeks and perhaps months before their attack—possibly during a seemingly innocuous summer renovation, officials said.

Investigators have only begun to piece together the planning that went into this worst terrorist attack in the new Russia, which by an official count on Sunday left 338 hostages dead. But the holes in the library's floor, which might easily be overlooked in the gruesome carnage of the school, underscored the sophistication and coordination that have increasingly characterized the attacks that have convulsed the country.

The attackers—described by the authorities as including Chechens, Ingush, ethnic Russians and some still-unidentified foreigners - seemed to follow a plan after they seized the school with precision and alacrity, forcing their hostages to help place explosives and build barricades that limited the options of Russian forces outside.

The attackers wore NATO-issued camouflage. They carried gas masks, compasses and first-aid kits. They communicated with hand-held radios, and brought along two sentry dogs, as expertly trained as the attackers themselves, the officials said. All suggested detailed planning, including surveillance and possibly rehearsals, the officials said.

“They knew the geography of the school grounds like their own backyard,” the chief spokesman for Russia's Federal Security Service, Sergei N. Ignatchenko, said in a telephone interview on Saturday. “This allowed them to choose sniper positions and place booby-traps on all possible access routes.”

The planning behind the siege mirrored that of a series of attacks that have roiled Russia, beginning with a similar siege of a Moscow theater during a performance of a musical called “Nord-Ost” in October 2002 and continuing through a grim litany of suicide bombings and other strikes that culminated in the brutality here last week.

Like militants of Al Qaeda, which President Vladimir V. Putin and others contend provides succor to Chechnya's separatists, the militants believed to be behind all the attacks have managed to deploy cells of ideologues who spend extended periods organizing and carrying out spectacular, unnerving attacks, often suicidal ones. Their tactics, complex and flexible and carried out by guerrillas who control no real territory where they could operate freely, have left the police and security forces guessing where the next attack will be.

The attackers—believed to be members of a contingent led by Shamil Basayev, Chechnya's most notorious and lethal rebel commander—have moved seamlessly between the North Caucasus and Moscow, while evading Russia's extensive, if at times ineffective, security apparatus. They have done so despite particular scrutiny that falls on anyone appearing to be Chechen, let alone large, heavily bearded and heavily armed men like those who seized Middle School No. 1.

In February, a female suicide bomber, possibly with an accomplice, destroyed a Moscow subway car, killing at least 41 early-morning commuters. In May, a bomb planted beneath a stadium grandstand killed Chechnya's president, Akhmad Kadyrov, as he watched a Victory Day parade in the republic's capital, Grozny.

In June, hundreds of insurgents used stolen uniforms of the local police to seize much of the capital of the adjacent Ingushetia region for hours, stopping and killing the real police officers who raced to reinforce their colleagues.

Nearly 100 died before the fighters withdrew and disappeared.

On Aug. 21, fighters carried out a similar raid in Grozny that killed at least 22 people. Three days later, bombs believed to be carried by two Chechen women destroyed separate passenger airliners almost simultaneously, killing 90 people. A week later, another bomber, also a woman, blew herself up outside the Rizhskaya subway station in Moscow, killing 10 people. Hours after that, the siege in Beslan began.

Since the “Nord-Ost” siege, the attacks have killed 1,000 Russians, most of them civilians with little connection to the Chechen conflict.

“They have shown they are able to do everything they want in each corner of Russia,” Aleksei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said of those behind the attacks.