Beslan school suspects killed in Russian raid
Russian authorities have killed five people suspected of aiding September’s school hostage-taking in southern Russia and arrested four other suspects, prosecutors said today.
Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel said in a statement that the arrested men were suspected of helping stage the hostage-taking in Beslan where assailants held more than 1,000 hostages for nearly three days before the siege ended on September 3 in gunfire and explosions that killed 330 people, nearly half of them children.
Shepel said that five other suspects were killed while resisting arrest. The statement did not say when or where the raid took place.
The suspects were accused of being involved in the school raid “at the stage of its preparation”, Shepel said.
Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev has claimed responsibility for the school seizure and other latest terror attacks in Russia, including twin plane bombings in August and an explosion near a Moscow subway station in which about 110 people died.
Anger has grown over the slow pace of the investigation, particularly among residents of Beslan.
Many suspect authorities are hiding information about the attackers and how they were so easily able to slip into town with a huge quantity of weapons.
Officials say 32 people took part in the attack, and that 31 of them were killed and one detained.
Shepel said the suspects arrested in the latest raid were also accused of involvement in an attack on police facilities in Russia’s southern region of Ingushetia near Chechnya in June, in which about 90 people were killed.
He added that a suspected al-Qaida liaison in Chechnya, Abu Dzeit, a Saudi Arabia national, who died in a Russian security sweep last month, was a key organiser of the school seizure and other terror attacks.
In a separate operation conducted by local police in Chechnya, one rebel was killed and seven others were captured, Ruslan Alkhanov, the interior minister in Chechnya’s Moscow-backed administration, said, according to the Interfax news agency.
One police officer was wounded in the raid that was part of official efforts to track down militants suspected of involvement in an attack on a police station in western Chechnya earlier this week.
