Beslan hostage-taking

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When Beslan was taken hostage in September 2004, North Caucasian terrorists from the Rijadus-Salichin unit took control of more than 1,100 children and adults in a school in the north Ossetian city ​​of Beslan . The hostage-taking ended in tragedy after three days - when the building was stormed by Russian forces, 331 hostages died, according to official information.

Memorial plaque for the victims

course

In Beslan, where the majority of Orthodox Christians live, on September 1, 2004 at 9:30 a.m., a terrorist squad of at least 32 hostage-takers stormed Middle School No. 1, which teaches students between the ages of seven and 18. According to unconfirmed reports, there were around 1,500 teachers, parents and students who had come together to celebrate the start of school at the time. Schools start on September 1st in all of Russia, when the first graders are solemnly welcomed in the presence of their parents and future classmates.

Some of the attackers were masked and heavily armed; some were equipped with explosive belts for suicide bombings, including two (official version) or four (according to witness statements) women (so-called black widows ). After an exchange of fire with the police , the attackers occupied the school building and took 1127 students, teachers and parents into their power. At least five people are said to have died in the first attack; Shots rang out repeatedly from the school building.

The attackers locked the hostages in a gym and mined all entrances and rooms in the school. To avoid storming the building, they threatened the killing of fifty hostages for each kidnapper killed by the police and twenty hostages for each injured. About fifty people managed to escape into the open air in the initial confusion.

The school was surrounded by the Russian police, army and OMON special units, which were waiting for the FSB special units, ALFA and Wympel to arrive ; however, the area was not properly cordoned off, so that many residents of Beslan had access to the school building. The Russian government initially announced that it would refrain from using force to protect the hostages and would negotiate with the hostage-takers. However, there was only one meeting with the ex-president of Ingushetia ( Ruslan Auschew ). He managed to free toddlers from infancy.

The hostage-takers apparently made the following demands:

  • Release of captured Chechen terrorists from Ingush prisons
  • Withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya
  • Putin's resignation

The hostage-takers refused to deliver food and water, even though there were small children among the hostages. The prisoners' thirst and heat were so intense that some of them drank their urine and stripped down to their underwear. The school principal, who suffered from diabetes , died because he was denied the necessary supply of insulin .

At the request of Russia, a special session of the UN Security Council took place on the evening of September 1st, which demanded the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages of the terrorist attack; US President George W. Bush offered Russia "support in every possible form".

On Thursday, September 2, 3:30 p.m. local time - thirty hours after the raid  - two severe explosions were heard in the school area and dark smoke was seen. The cause of the explosion was initially unclear, but according to a correspondent for the Russian TV station NTW , it sounded like a grenade launcher that may have been fired at the blocking troops from the school. 26 hostages, some mothers with their children, were released.

On Friday, September 3, the hostage-takers and the Russian units agreed on the removal of bodies. During the evacuation, there was an unexplained strong explosion. When a group of hostages fled the building, the terrorists began shooting at them, according to the official version of the incident; However, only disfigured corpses were presented to the public, which could indicate a crash of the roof in the sports hall. The situation became unmanageable, and from around 12:30 p.m. local time, hours of firefight developed, during which Russian ALFA and Wympel units stormed the school building. The Russian military fired tank shots at the school building, but only after several hours were they able to take full control of it. As later became known, the special forces were not in agreement on who should have the supreme authority in the allegedly spontaneous assault.

In the course of the fighting, the ceiling in the school gymnasium collapsed, killing many people. According to official reports, the ceiling was blown by the terrorists, while other reports indicate that the collapse was caused by the inadequate use of military means by Russian forces. The school was fired at by T-72 main battle tanks with 125 mm cannons and BTR-80 armored personnel carriers with 14.5 mm Vladimirov KPW machine guns .

According to official information, 704 people, including more than 200 children, were injured during the apparently haphazard storm. There were a total of 331 deaths. However, 394 dead were counted in the Vladikavkaz morgue alone . 27 hostage-takers were killed, including two women. One hostage-taker, Nurpashi Kulayev , was arrested alive, and two others were killed by the military during the arrest.

According to the Chechen side, the Russian secret service wanted to lure terrorists into a trap in North Ossetia. Russian military opened a corridor to the militant group for this purpose; The hostage-takers, however, thwarted the plans of the secret service by striking at another location, well equipped for the deployment, namely in Beslan.

Identity of the hostage takers

In an internet statement, the radical Islamist Shamil Basayev confessed to the taking of Beslan hostage. "The operation ... in the city of Beslan (was carried out) by the second martyrs battalion under the command of Colonel Orstkoyev," said the declaration signed with the battle name of Basayev, Abdallah Shamil. The hostage-takers - Chechen and Ingush terrorists - had entered from Ingushetia .

According to official information, the Chechen Nurpashi Kulayev was the only hostage-taker who had survived the storm. In the chaos of the liberation operation, he escaped through several police cordons before he was stopped by passers-by. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in May 2006. According to eyewitness reports, several hostage-takers are said to have escaped, which the Russian media and the commission appointed for this purpose vehemently denied. Only at the end of 2006 did the Russian side admit that they had put on the wanted list at least one other terrorist who had survived the Beslan hostage-taking.

The hostage takers were well equipped and may have had helpers outside the school. Disguised as construction workers, during the school renovation that had previously taken place, they had already laid out extensive weapons depots under the floorboards of some of the classrooms. Observers also point to corruption among local officials, without whom such an action would hardly be feasible.

The hostage-takers' actions are strikingly similar to the hostage-taking in Moscow's Dubrovka Theater in October 2002, when militant Chechens took 700 hostages. The action took place a week after the terrorist attack by Chechens on a subway station in Moscow , killing 10 and the demolition of two passenger planes by female suicide bombers , killing 89. In conclusion, the Russian government did not attribute the attacks to Chechen insurgents, but spoke of "international terrorism".

Information policy of the authorities

While local broadcasters spoke of 1,200 hostages, a spokesman for the North Ossetian President and the FSB's secret service first named 130 and later 354 hostages. Only after a released woman had spoken publicly of “over 1000 hostages” on September 2, this number was corrected upwards a little; the incumbent President of North Ossetia, Alexander Dschasochow, admitted that wrong numbers were initially given. For hours after the storm, the Russian television stations did not report that people had been killed.

Critics of the deployment of the interior ministry's special units are said to have come under pressure from the government: Raf Shakirov, editor-in-chief of the renowned daily Izvestia , was dismissed at the request of a major shareholder of the newspaper. According to Mommsen / Nussberger, this is due to the peculiarity of the Russian system of controlled media, according to which, if a problem was not yet positioned at the top level and therefore no instructions were available on how to deal with it, news would simply fail. This is exactly what happened during the Beslan hostage-taking. According to Andrey Kozenko , those in charge of the mass media are discussing their content with the Kremlin. The cover picture of Izvestia alone would have resulted in the dismissal of the editor-in-chief for fear of disrupting the Kremlin's narrative. Several smaller actions in front of Beslan had simply been ignored by the state-controlled media; Simons expressed the theory that Beslan would have been dimensioned so large by the hostage-takers that the media would be forced to report.

The allegation by official bodies, later withdrawn, that at least ten Arabs were among the terrorists was also criticized. The Russian government was accused of trying to establish links between the Chechens and the international terrorist network Al-Qaeda . The arrested hostage-taker Nurpashi Kulayev said on television that the attack on the Chechen ex-president Aslan Aliyevich Maskhadov and the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev , on whose head a reward of 10 million dollars was offered. Aslan Maskhadov denied involvement, while Shamil Basayev confessed to this act of terrorism and threatened further attacks. He confirmed this in an interview with a team from the American television station CBS in July 2005. Although he fully acknowledged his responsibility, he was driven to these acts by Russia. The broadcast of the interview led to diplomatic entanglements between the United States and Russia when the former did not condemn a journalist's contact with a terrorist as Russia had requested. The US tried to limit the damage, but did not condemn the broadcaster CBS, as this would have contradicted their understanding of democratic rights .

Consequences for Russian politics

In the wake of the hostage-taking, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a series of restructuring measures that he believes should stabilize the country and prevent future terrorist activities. To this end, the Kremlin's power should be expanded to ensure compliance with federal laws. Furthermore, the cooperation between the various security organs should be improved.

The governors of the regions and republics of Russia are to be proposed by the president in the future; the regional parliaments should only confirm or reject them. In addition, the Duma should only be elected according to proportional representation (in the parliamentary elections in 2003, the ruling party United Russia would have won even more seats with this electoral system ).

Corresponding laws were passed at the end of 2004; According to Putin's announcement, they should not violate the constitution .

On September 5, 2004, the North Ossetian Interior Minister Kazbek Dzantiyev resigned.

In connection with the planned establishment of a central counter-terrorism service, Putin later said: “Terrorists must be destroyed directly in their camps. If necessary, you have to catch them abroad too. "

Further remarks by Putin on “foreign influence” in the large-scale hostage-taking were taken by most observers as a reference to al-Qaeda .

Legal processing

On December 22, 2006, the Russian authorities submitted an investigation report edited by the Kremlin and the domestic intelligence service FSB. According to this, the dead in Beslan were the victims of 32 terrorists who committed suicide. They refused to negotiate and finally detonated two bombs.

Other details came to light during the trial of the hostage-taker Nurpashi Kulayev . According to several survivors, up to 80 terrorists took part in the hostage-taking. These had demanded negotiators and in return wanted to release hostages - however: the crisis team led by the FSB had rejected the demand on orders from President Putin.

In April 2017, the European Court of Human Rights sentenced the Russian state to fines on the basis of 409 complaints about inadequate crisis management and disproportionately harsh procedures in the liberation operation. Accordingly, the Kremlin was obliged to pay the survivors and relatives of the victims between 5,000 and 30,000 euros in pain and suffering. The court also criticized an inadequate investigation into the hostage drama. Most of the corpses were not autopsied. It is therefore not clear whether the victims were killed by shooting by the hostage-takers or by the armed forces. The Russian government spokesman Dmitri Peskov sharply criticized the decision of the ECHR and denied all allegations.

literature

  • Julia Jusik: Beslan. Beslan School. The dictionary of horror. Dumont Literature and Art Verlag, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-8321-7994-1 .
  • Andrea Strunk-Jeska : Beslan. Requiem. Brendow, Moers 2005, ISBN 3-86506-071-4 .
  • Valerie Sawlajew: Beslan - a North Ossetian tragedy. (Photo book with 2000 photos mainly about the subsequent rehabilitation of children in Ukraine; Russian and English)

Web links

Commons : Beslan hostage-taking  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chechen group behind Beslan claims Ingush attack , accessed August 5, 2016
  2. ↑ Patrick Truffer: A Long Way: The Russian Military Reform - Part 1. In: officiere.ch. Officers.ch: Security Policy - Armed Forces - Media, January 18, 2019, accessed on January 5, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Basayev is committed to the Beslan attack , Frankfurter Allgemeine , September 17, 2004
  4. ↑ Russia does not deserve Press Freedom Day , Vice, May 6, 2014
  5. ↑ Margareta Mommsen , Angelika Nussberger: The Putin system: controlled democracy and political justice in Russia , CH Beck, 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-54790-4 , page 51
  6. ^ Greg Simons: Mass Media and Modern Warfare: Reporting on the Russian War on Terrorism , Routledge, 2016, ISBN 978-1-317-09967-3 , page 190
  7. ^ Tödlicher Terror-Einsatz, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung am weekend, 15./16./17. April 2017, p. 9.
  8. ↑ Hostage-taking in Beslan: Kremlin criticizes judgment of the human rights court . In: FAZ.NET . April 13, 2017, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed January 25, 2018]).

Coordinates: 43 ° 11 ′ 3 "  N , 44 ° 32 ′ 27.3"  E