Word: beslan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Enemy Within Two senior police or military officers are being sought in connection with the Beslan school siege, the Russian government's chief investigator, Alexander Torshin, announced. At least 330 people, many of them children, died last September during the storming of School Number 1 in Beslan, where guerrillas loyal to the Chechen rebel Shamil Basayev were holding more than a thousand hostages. The two men, whose identities were not revealed, are "a little above the rank of major or lieut. colonel," Torshin declared. If the men are guilty, their high rank would be more surprising than the fact that...
...Lilia Shevtsova, an independent analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, says, "There is no doubt that many intelligence and security specialists share [Belkovsky's] views." Shevtsova thinks things really started going wrong last year. The massacre in Beslan in September, in which over 300 children and adults died after pro-Chechen rebels seized a school in North Ossetia, "underlined the failure of the Kremlin's Chechnya operations," she says. The final destruction of Yukos in December, when Baikal Finance Group, a consortium linked to the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft, bought its main oil producing unit, Yuganskneftegaz...
...strange irony, another group of people came out onto the streets last week to publicize their demands: the families of the victims of Beslan. Since Jan. 20, several hundred have occupied a major highway in North Ossetia, cutting off all traffic, to draw attention to their demand for the resignation of Alexander Dzasokhov, President of North Ossetia, whom they hold responsible for last year's tragedy. Some inside the Kremlin fear that Putin's combination of concessions and crackdowns won't be enough to stop the same thing being demanded...
...prospects for stability any time soon. British hostage Kenneth Bigley was beheaded. It emerged that U.S. forces had found floor plans of schools in six American states on a computer disc in Iraq, which launched a round of newscasters interviewing school superintendents from Florida to Oregon about whether a Beslan-style massacre could happen here. Al-Qaeda was thought to be behind the bombing of three Egyptian tourist sites popular with Israelis. While the White House welcomed the historic image of Afghans holding their first--and miraculously nonviolent--democratic elections, charges of possible fraud marred the picture of liberty working...
...Vedeno with impunity and seemingly unleash strikes at will in Russia perfectly illustrates how the Chechen conflict has degenerated from a struggle for self-determination into a vicious war of terror in which Russian and Chechen civilians have become the targets. As the traditional 40-day mourning period in Beslan came to an end last week, people across Russia were left worrying where Basayev will strike next. Basayev, a short, wiry 39-year-old, comes from a land famed for its anti-Russian insurgents. In the 19th century Imam Shamil, with whom Basayev shares a first name, led a decades...