Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR)
Sept 23 2004

Confusion Surrounds Beslan Band

Unanswered questions about the identity of the group who seized the
school in Beslan.

By Timur Aliev, Aslanbek Dadayev and Ruslan Zhadayev in Chechnya and
Ingushetia (CRS No. 254, 23-Sep-04)

Tagir Khachaburov lives alone in a poor whitewashed two-room house
with an overgrown front yard and ramshackle wooden gates in the
Ingush village of Galashki.

His quiet existence was shattered earlier this month by the
accusation that his 32-year-old son had been identified as probably
the most hated man in Russia. Ruslan Khachaburov, nicknamed Polkovnik
(or `Colonel’ in English) had been named as the leader of the
extremist group that seized the school in Beslan on September 1.

Tagir’s bloodshot, tear-filled eyes testify to what he has gone
through in the last three weeks. He explained to IWPR that he had not
seen his son for five years. He said Ruslan had not lived with him
since his marriage broke up when Ruslan was two and the child went to
live with his mother, an ethnic Chechen, first in the Stavropol
region of southern region, then in the Chechen village of Orekhovo.

`When he grew up Ruslan lived in the town of Oryol in Russia,’ Tagir
said. `He ran away from there after he killed two Armenians in
self-defence. After that he was on the run. He last came to see me in
1999 for a few hours. I haven’t seen him since then. When I heard
what happened in Beslan I could not believe that Ruslan could have
been there.’

`He wasn’t a terrorist,’ Tagir went on. `I still can’t believe he was
there. My son isn’t a terrorist. Our politics now is like 1937. They
can pin anything they like on a person to blacken his name.’

Khachaburov said that the Russian security services had taken all the
photographs of his two sons – his other son Bashir was a rebel
fighter and died several years ago – for their investigation into
Beslan. He said he had been constantly raided by the security
services ever since the June attack on the town of Nazran Ingushetia
by Chechen rebels, which resulted in more than 90 deaths and in which
his son’s name first came up.

Khachaburov’s neighbours suffered much more grievously. One of them,
named Beslan Arapkhanov, the father of seven children, lived on the
same street. According to research by the human rights organisation
Memorial, on the morning of July 21 a group of masked men burst into
his house and shot him dead. Then one of the gunmen pulled a
photograph from his jacket and was heard to say that `it’s not him’,
and the group left.

It seems that the group had intended to kill Ruslan Khachaburov and
had picked the wrong target.

Despite this tragedy, Musa Arapkhanov, a cousin of the dead man, told
IWPR that he had doubts that Ruslan Khachaburov had been guilty of
the charges against him and that he was an Islamic extremist or
Wahhabi.

`When he was here last year, he faithfully went to the mosque and did
the zikr [traditional Chechen prayer ritual], which the Wahhabis
don’t do,’ said Arapkhanov.

The North Ossetian authorities have issued a list of 13 names of the
group of around 30 hostage-takers who seized Beslan’s School No. 1 on
September 1. But even the identity of some of those named is not
entirely certain and some relatives are questioning the official
version of events.

Notorious Chechen warrior Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for
the attack last week on the Islamist website Kavkaz Center, which has
since had its activity suspended.

Calling the attack `Nord-West’ in a reference to the Nord-Ost musical
which was playing at a packed Dubrovka theatre in Moscow, when it was
seized by militants in October 2002, Basayev wrote, `Thirty-three
mujahadin took part in Nord-West. Two of them were women. We prepared
four [women] but I sent two of them to Moscow on August 24. They then
boarded the two airplanes that blew up. In the group there were 12
Chechen men, two Chechen women, nine Ingush, three Russians, two
Arabs, two Ossetians, one Tartar, one Kabardinian and one Guran. The
Gurans are a people who live near Lake Baikal who are practically
Russified.’

Even before Basayev’s letter, the Russian security services had
identified several of the hostage-takers as being associated with
him.

The name of `Polkovnik’ came up from the televised account of the
only surviving hostage-taker Nur-Pasha Kulayev, alleged to have
worked for Basayev. Kulayev said, `We were collected in a wood by a
man who went by the name of Polkovnik and he said we had to seize a
school in Beslan. They told us the order came from Maskhadov and
Basayev. When we asked Polkovnik why we had to do that he replied:
because we had to unleash war across the whole of the Caucasus.’

Nur-Pasha Kulayev’s elder brother Khan-Pasha, who apparently died in
the school, was also said to have been a bodyguard of Basayev.

The parents of the two brothers live in the village of Novy Engeloi
in southeastern Chechnya. They told IWPR that the first they knew
about their sons’ apparent involvement in the Beslan tragedy was when
they saw their younger son on television news saying that he had
taken part in the school seizure and heard that their eldest had been
killed in the siege.

The parents said that Khan-Pasha had been wounded in shooting in the
village in 2001 and went to hospital. There he was suspected of being
a fighter and they did not see him for another three months. When he
came back he had his arm amputated because of gangrene and he was
psychologically disturbed.

The official version of how Kulayev was detained is somewhat
different. In August 2001, the Interfax news agency reported that he
had been seized in the village of Kurchaloi as one of three men in a
group loyal to the Saudi-born fighter Khattab.

The last time the parents saw their two sons was at the end of August
when both men were living in the Ingush village of Malgobek and their
wives had gone to visit relatives in Chechnya.

However, in a statement that, if true, casts doubt on the official
version of events, neighbours in Malgobek firmly told IWPR that the
younger of the two, Nur-Pasha, had been at home in Malgobek on
September 1, when the school siege started. The neighbours did not
want to be quoted by name.

To confuse things further Basayev said in his statement that he had
recruited both brothers to `stand on guard’.

`Everything that the man who swore by Allah that he wanted to live
[in other words Nur-Pasha Kulayev on Russian television] is not
important,’ Basayev said. `I brought the Kulayev brothers and two of
their fellow-villagers into the group at the last minute to make up
numbers at half past four on August 31 and sent them into the
operation at eight o’clock. I personally knew only Khan-Pasha
Kulayev, whose right arm was missing.’

Similar confusion surrounds the involvement of Iznaur Kodzoyev, an
Ingush believed to have been in the group. His fellow-villagers in
the Ingush settlement of Kantyshevo said he was an extreme political
and religious radical. The Ingush interior ministry has linked him to
the June attack on Ingushetia. However, Iznaur’s cousin Aslan
Kodzoyev said he saw him in Kantyshevo on September 2, the second day
of the school siege.

Finally the identity has still not been fully confirmed of the Ingush
man known as `Magas’. At first, he was believed to be a man named
Magomed Yevloyev, but now the official Russian version is that he was
in fact a former 30-year-old Ingush policeman named Ali Taziev.

According to the Ingush prosecutor’s office in 1998, Taziev was
guarding Olga Uspenskaya, the wife of Valery Fateyev, an adviser to
the Ingush president. Uspenskaya, Taziev and one other bodyguard were
snatched by gunmen and held hostage. Uspenskaya herself was freed in
2000, but not the two guards. The body of one of them was later found
and buried and Taziev was generally believed also to have died a
heroic death.

Now the authorities say they believe Taziev is in fact the very same
`Magas’, who allegedly led the raid on Nazran in June and then took
part in the school seizure in Beslan.

In the village of Nasyr-Kort near Nazran, Taziev’s mother Lida has
been sick for two weeks. `Three years ago we were already afraid he
was dead,’ she told IWPR weeping. `We held a wake for him. He can’t
be this Magas. If he was alive he would have come home.’

The work of establishing the true identities of all the
hostage-takers in Beslan has evidently only just begun.

Timur Aliev is IWPR’s Chechnya coordinator. Aslanbek Dadayev works
for Radio Liberty in Chechnya. Ruslan Zhadayev is deputy editor of
the Chechenskoe Obshchestvo newspaper.