Sometimes the Russians are their own worst enemy.
[KavkazUzel] The crews of four tanks deployed to the school building in Beslan were ordered to fire on the building when hostages were inside, according to materials from interrogations of servicemen and hostages published by Novaya Gazeta.
As "Kavkazsky Uzel" wrote, on the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attack in Beslan, the cultural and patriotic center for the prevention of terrorism "Beslan School No. 1" was opened. The school grounds had to be preserved, says Emma Tagaeva. The center will become international and is necessary to preserve the memory of the terrorist attack, says Atsamaz Misikov.
The project took three years to implement, and 206.1 million rubles were allocated for the creation of the center. Twenty years later, the authorities have still not given a concrete answer as to how terrorists managed to organize the 2004 seizure of a school in Beslan, which resulted in the deaths of more than three hundred people, North Ossetian journalists noted.
On September 1, 2004, militants took 1,128 hostages in the gymnasium of School No. 1 in Beslan. The operation to free them ended on September 3, 2004. As a result of the terrorist attack, 334 people were killed, including 186 children, and another 810 people were injured. The "Caucasian Knot" has prepared a report "Terrorist attack in Beslan (September 1-3, 2004)" and a chronicle of the terrorist attack and the events that followed.
| The Beslan attack was a project of Shamil Basayev, head of the Chechen insurgency (which at that time called itself the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, renamed two years later as Al Qaeda’s Caucasus Emirate), financed by Abu Omar Al Seif, who was Al Qaeda’s man in Chechnya. It is said that the money he brought came from the Saudis, and that the jihadis involved in the attack on Beslan School Number One, some of whom were Arabs, were trained in al Qaeda camps. |
As follows from the interrogation protocols of the Chief of Staff, Head of the UFSB of North Ossetia Valery Andreyev, the Chief of the FSB Special Operations Center, General Alexander Tikhonov, reported that on September 2 he asked the command of the 58th Army to provide tanks to the Alpha and Vympel special forces to conduct the operation to rescue the hostages. The Commander of the 58th Army, Viktor Sobol, who was also part of the operational headquarters, gave the order to bring tanks into Beslan.
At 18:00 on September 2, exactly one hour after the former President of Ingushetia, General Ruslan Aushev, led 26 hostages out of the school seized by terrorists and managed to convince the militants to continue negotiations and allow the bodies of the dead hostages to be taken away, tanks entered Beslan and stopped near a transformer substation next to a railroad crossing, three hundred meters from the school seized by terrorists.
The hostages stood in the windows
The first shot from the tank was fired on September 3 at 14:25 Moscow time. At the same time, conscript Dmitry Godovalov, who commanded tank #328, said that the tank crews, who were in their combat vehicles, could clearly see the hostages through the viewing slits and triplex on the windows of the canteen. "The hostages were standing in the windows
"This cafeteria became a real trap for the hostages. The fact is that in the entire first school, only the cafeteria windows had bars installed. Moreover, the bars were installed not on the outside of the windows, as is usually the case, but on the inside of the building. This fact is clearly recorded in numerous photographs of the cafeteria destroyed during the assault, including such photos in the materials of the criminal case. These bars became the main obstacle for the operational combat groups "Alpha" and "Vympel" deployed from Kominterna Street, because they did not allow the special forces to get inside the school. The headquarters tried to develop a scenario for the assault with a minimum number of casualties among both the hostages and the special forces - General Tikhonov spoke about this at a meeting of the parliamentary commission, in addition, this point is reflected in the situational examination. The bars on the cafeteria windows could have become a determining factor in the decision to use tanks. Because the internal fastening of the bars did not allow them to be knocked down or torn out using heavy equipment," writes Milashina.
At 14.25, one of the tanks fired directly at the window of the canteen, where the terrorists had placed their hostages as a human shield. Yuri Savelyev, a member of the federal parliamentary commission, who analyzed in detail in his special opinion the use of tanks during the storming of the Beslan school, assumes that it was tank No. 325, since it had more powerful active armor than other tanks. The shell hit the school gatepost and flew into the assembly hall.
Only 14 years after the tragedy, in December 2018, the presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, Alexander Matovnikov, made the first official admission since the terrorist attack that the storming of the school had been planned from the very beginning, despite protests from local residents. The presidential envoy also confirmed that the school had been shelled from a tank.
More than 50 witnesses from among former hostages and city residents testified that tanks fired at the canteen between 15:00 and 16:00 (closer to 16:00) on September 3. It was at this time, at 15:10, that General Tikhonov gave the order to the Alpha and Vympel combat groups to directly storm the school. Until that time, the school, mainly the combat positions of the militants, was actively shelled with small arms and grenade launchers. Until 15:10 Moscow time on September 3, not a single special forces soldier was in the school building, the publication says.
The tank crews fired at the windows of the canteen, so the damage to the school's façade wall was minimal; the main damage to the walls, ceilings and floors from tank shells was recorded inside these rooms. At that time, dozens of hostages were able to escape from the gymnasium, which had been destroyed by the first explosions, either on their own or with the help of local residents. However, a significant number of hostages, at the request of the terrorists, moved from the gymnasium to the main part of the school (classrooms, canteen, kitchens) and to its southern wing, the article notes.
The author of the article also emphasized that the number of hostages killed directly in the cafeteria will most likely never be known.
"Immediately after the assault, all the bodies of the dead were taken out of the cafeteria. An autopsy of the bodies and the establishment of the real causes of death of the people killed in the school were not carried out. And in the criminal case and death certificates they wrote that all the hostages died as a result of explosions in the gym," claims Elena Milashina.
At this time, an attempt was made to tear off the bars from the dining room window by the crew of BTR-80 No. 834, commanded by the commander of the reconnaissance and airborne platoon of military unit 12356 Andrei Shuvarikov. However, the terrorists, using the hostages as cover, stopped this attempt with direct fire to kill.
Trying to carry out the order, Andrei Shuvarikov and Warrant Officer Sergei Ryabikhin were wounded, and the BTR was hit by terrorists with an under-barrel grenade launcher.
The investigation, despite the fact that the attempt was unsuccessful, supported the official version, stating that the servicemen of the crew of the armored personnel carrier #834, Shuvarikov and Ryabikhin, managed to hook a cable and tear off the bars on the windows. But this was denied in court by both the hostages and the only, according to the investigation, surviving terrorist Nurpasha Kulaev.
"When they fired from the tank, the bars [in the dining room] fell... The bars were inside. They did not shoot with the tank at the second floor. They shot at the bars. This is inside the first floor," he said.
The hostages who survived in the dining room said that the bars "flew off" as a result of the shelling. "I remember that there was a loud shot, and then the bars [flew off]. I determined by ear that these were shots from a tank, by the way the room shook when they shot. Before that, the militants also shot from machine guns and something else. Then the building shook, too, but not to such an extent," said hostage Zhanna Tsirikhova.
On September 4, during an inspection of the school, investigators actually found window bars inside the cafeteria. In addition, the same inspection recorded a large number of characteristic destructions of the interior walls, floors and ceiling of the cafeteria and adjoining utility rooms, which could not have occurred from the use of firearms and grenades, the publication says.
During the interrogation of the participants in the events in September 2004, a version about the grating, the cable and the APC emerged. The tankers in their testimony claim that only one tank, No. 325, fired seven shots, and that it was in the evening. This tank was commanded by Guram Abuladze.
The second wave of interrogations of the tankers took place in 2005, after the victims testified at the Kulaev trial that all the tanks had repeatedly fired at the canteen during the day, when the hostages were still there. The repeated interrogations of the tankers and servicemen of military unit 12356 almost word for word coincide with their first interrogations.
Only one phrase is added: "Tank No. 325 fired at the school when there were "no more living hostages" in it." The tank crews were interrogated for the third time in 2006. From these interrogations it follows directly that the commander of tank No. 325, Guram Abuladze, voluntarily changed his testimony between 2005 and 2006 and testified under the protocol that on September 3, 2004, he and other tank crews received orders from officers to fire at the canteen where the hostages were. But Guram Abuladze apparently refused to carry out this order, Milashina notes in the publication.
Ivan Bazhenov, a tank driver, said on May 18, 2006, that on the afternoon of September 3, "the Alpha special forces began preparing to storm the school."
According to him, he heard an order on the radio for one of the tanks not to get nervous and not to shoot. "No one fired from the tanks during the assault, at least I did not hear any shots. I did not hear anyone on the radio ordering Abuladze to shoot at the school, at least when I was in the tank, and when I got out of it, I could not hear the radio," he said.
Another conscript, Aleksandr Asharin, said on June 9, 2006, that he did not know that "Abuladze refused to carry out the order <...> to shoot at the school when there were hostages there." "I cannot explain why witnesses and victims claim that the tank fired during the daytime; maybe they got something mixed up," he said.
I know that there was an order to fire at the school during the day when there were hostages there.
This testimony proves that Abuladze told the investigation about the order from the officers to shoot at the school, the publication notes.
This was confirmed by Dmitry Godovalov, commander of tank No. 328. "I know that there was an order to fire at the school during the day, when there were hostages there. But we refused to fire at the school, since the hostages were standing in the windows and waving white rags," he said.
Sixteen years after the terrorist attack, the investigation admitted that tanks had indeed fired at the school during the assault - in 2020, VGTRK aired a film by Alexander Rogatkin about the tragedy in Beslan. The author of the film stated that "a tank was also used." "He fired blanks in order to “to make breaches in the walls for the passage of special forces, and with combat shells,” Rogatkin asserts.
Albert Khasanov, senior investigator for especially important cases of the Investigative Directorate for the North Caucasus Federal District, also spoke about this in the film.
"The T-72 tank had been used before, but it fired blanks. The combat use of the tank, that is, when it fired high-explosive fragmentation shells, was after 21:00," he said.
However, in the weapons reports available in the criminal case, all T-72s only have high-explosive fragmentation shells. According to Milashina, "the version about the "blanks" was created by the victims themselves, who saw the tanks shooting at the school, but they could not imagine that the tanks could shoot at hostages standing in the windows and waving white rags." At the same time, all the interrogated tank crews confirmed that there were no "blanks" in the ammunition of their tanks, the article says.