1999 Russian apartment bombings

Russian apartment bombings
Location	Russia (Buynaksk-Moscow-Volgodonsk)
Date	September 4-16, 1999
Target	Low-income apartment buildings
Attack type	Time bombings
Deaths	Nearly 300
Injured	More than 1,000

The Russian apartment bombings were a series of explosions that hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing nearly 300 people and spreading a wave of fear across the country. The bombings, together with the Dagestan War, led the country into the Second Chechen War. Chechen militants were blamed but no Chechen field commander accepted responsibility for the bombings and Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov denied any involvement of his government.

The blasts hit Buynaksk on September 4, Moscow on September 9 and September 13 and Volgodonsk on September 16. A similar explosive device was found and defused in an apartment block in the Russian city of Ryazan on September 22. Next day Vladimir Putin praised the vigilance of the Ryzanians and ordered the air bombing of Grozny, which marked the beginning of the Second Chechen War. A few hours later, three FSB agents who had planted this device were arrested by the local police. The incident was declared to be a training exercise. These events led to allegations that the bombings were in fact a "false flag" attack perpetrated by the FSB in order to legitimize the resumption of military activities in Chechnya and bring Vladimir Putin to powerHowever the evidence of FSB involvement was only circumstantial.

Russian Parliament member Yuri Shchekochikhin filed two motions for a parliamentary investigation of the events, but the motions were rejected by the Russian Duma in March 2000. An independent public commission to investigate the bombings chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev was hampered by government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin have since died in apparent assassinations. The Commission's lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested.

An official investigation of the bombings was completed in 2002 and concluded that all the bombings were organized and led by Achemez Gochiyaev who remains at large, and ordered by Islamist warlords Ibn Al-Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif who have been killed. Five other suspects have been killed and six have been convicted by Russian courts on terrorism-related charges.

The bombings

Overview

Five apartment bombings took place and at least three attempted bombings were prevented. All bombing had the same "signature", judging from the nature and the volume of the destruction. In each case the explosive RDX was used, and the timers were set to go off at night and inflict the maximum number of civilian casualties. The explosives were placed to destroy the weakest, most critical elements of the buildings and force the buildings to "collapse like a house of cards". The terrorists were able to obtain or manufacture several tons of powerful explosives and deliver them to numerous destinations across Russia

Moscow mall

On August 31, 1999, at 20:00 local time (8:00 PM), a powerful explosion took place in a busy Moscow shopping center. One person was killed and 40 others injured. According to FSB, the explosion had been caused by a bomb of about 300g of explosives.

Buynaksk, Dagestan

On September 4, 1999, at 22:00 (18:00 GMT), a car bomb detonated outside a five story apartment building in the city of Buynaksk in Dagestan, near the border of Chechnya. The building was housing Russian border guard soldiers and their families. 64 people were killed and 133 were injured in the explosion. Another car bomb was found and defused in the same town. The defused bomb was in a car containing 2,706 kilograms of explosives. It was discovered by local residents in a parking lot surrounded by an army hospital and residential buildings.

Moscow, Pechatniki

Bombing at Guryanova Street. One section of the building completely collapsed.

On September 9, 1999, shortly after midnight local time, at 20:00 GMT, 300 to 400 kg of explosives detonated on the ground floor of an apartment building in south-east Moscow (19 Guryanova Street). The nine-story building was destroyed, killing 94 people inside and injuring 249 others. 15 nearby buildings were also damaged. A total of 108 apartments were destroyed during the bombing. An FSB spokesman identified the explosive as RDX. Residents said a few minutes before the blast four men were seen speeding away from the building in a car.

The President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin ordered the search of 30,000 residential buildings in Moscow for explosives.. He took personal control of the investigation of the blast.. Vladimir Putin declared September 13 a day of mourning for the victims of the attacks.

Moscow, Kashirskoye highway

On September 13, 1999, at 5:00 a.m., a large bomb exploded in a basement of an apartment block on Kashirskoye Highway in southern Moscow, about 6 km from the place of the last attack. 118 people died and 200 were injured. This was the deadliest blast in the chain of bombings. The eight-story building was flattened, littering the street with debris and throwing some concrete pieces hundreds of yards away.

Moscow, attempted bombings

According to FSB public relations director Alexander Zdanovich and Oksana Yablokova of The Moscow Times, official investigators defused explosives on Borisovskiye Prudy street in Moscow September 14, 1999. Yuri Felshtinsky and Alexander Litvinenko added a site in the Liublino district and another in Kapotnya to the list of caches. Satter wrote that three attempted bombings were prevented.

According to the messages received by Yuri Felshtinsky and by Prima News agency from someone claiming to be Achemez Gochiyaev, on September 13, 1999 a bomb was defused in a building in the Kapotnya area. A warehouse containing several tons of explosives and six timing devices was found at Borisovskiye Prudy. The author of the messages wrote that he called the police and warned about the bombing locations, which helped to prevent a large number of further casualties. Gochiyaev or his impersonators claimed that he was framed by his old acquaintance, an FSB officer who asked him to rent basements "as storage facilities" at four locations where bombs were later found.

Volgodonsk

A truck bomb exploded on September 16, 1999, outside a nine-story apartment complex in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk, killing 17 people and injuring 69. The bombing took place at 5:57 am. Surrounding buildings were also damaged. The blast also happened nine miles from a nuclear power plant. Prime Minister Putin signed a decree calling on law enforcement and other agencies to develop plans within three days to protect industry, transportation, communications, food processing centers and nuclear complexes.

Ryazan incident

At 8:30 P.M. on September 22, 1999, a resident of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan noticed two suspicious men who carried sacks into the basement from a car with a Moscow license plate. He alerted the police, but by the time they arrived the car and the men were gone. The policemen found three 50 kg sacks of white powder in the basement. A detonator and a timing device were attached and armed. The timer was set to 5:30 AM. Yuri Tkachenko, the head of the local bomb squad, disconnected the detonator and the timer and tested the three sacks of white substance with a "MO-2" gas analyzer. The device detected RDX, the military explosive used in all previous bombings.. Police and rescue vehicles converged from different parts of the city, and 30,000 residents were evacuated from the area. 1,200 local police officers armed with automatic weapons set up roadblocks on highways around the city and started patrolling railroad stations and airports to hunt the terrorists down.

At 1:30 A.M. on September 23, the detonator and sacks were taken away by the local FSB in a truck. At 5 A.M. Radio Rossiya reported about the attempted bombing noting that the bomb was set up to go off at 5:30 A.M. In the morning, "Ryazan resembled a city under siege". Composite sketches of three suspected terrorists, two men and a woman, were posted everywhere in the city and shown on TV. At 8:00 A.M. Russian television reported the attempt to blow out the building in Ryzan and identified the explosive used in the bomb as RDX. Vladimir Rushailo announced later that police prevented a terrorist act. A news block at 4 p.m. reported that the explosives failed to detonate during their testing outside the city

At 7 P.M. Prime Minister of Russia Vladimir Putin praised the vigilance of the Ryazanians and called for the air bombing of the Chechen capital Grozny in response to the terrorism acts. He said :

If the sacks which proved to contain explosive were noticed, that means there is a positive side to it, if only the fact that the public is reacting correctly to the events taking place in our country today. I'd like ...to thank the public... No panic, no sympathy for the bandits.

Later, the same evening, a telephone service employee in Ryazan tapped into long distance phone conversations and managed to detect a talk in which an out-of-town person suggested to others that they "split up" and "make your own way out". That person's number was traced to a telephone exchange unit serving FSB offices. When arrested, the detainees produced FSB identification cards. They were soon released on orders from Moscow.

On September 24, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the exercise was carried out to test responses after the earlier blasts. The Ryzan FSB "reacted with fury" and issued a statement saying:

This announcement came as a surprise to us and appeared at the moment when the ...FSB had identified the places of residence in Ryzan of those involved in planting the explosive device and was prepared to detain them.

Related events

Explosives in Ryazan

The Russian Deputy Prosecutor declared in 2002 that a comprehensive testing of the samples showed no traces of any explosives, and that sacks from Ryazan contained only sugar. However Yuri Tkachenko, the police explosives expert who defused the Ryazan bomb, insisted that it was real. Tkachenko said that the explosives, including a timer, a power source, and a detonator were genuine military equipment and obviously prepared by a professional. He also said that the gas analyzer that tested the vapors coming from the sacks unmistakably indicated the presence of RDX. Tkachenko said that it was out of the question that the analyzer could have malfunctioned, as the gas analyzer was of world class quality, cost $20,000, and was maintained by a specialist who worked according to a strict schedule, checking the analyzer after each use and making frequent prophylactic checks. Tkachenko pointed out that meticulous care in the handling of the gas analyzer was a necessity because the lives of the bomb squad experts depended on the reliability of their equipment. The police officers who answered the original call and discovered the bomb also insisted that it was obvious from its appearance that the substance in the bomb was not sugar.. However, at a joint press conference with a local FSB director two years later, in December 2001, Tkachenko said that he did not use any gas analyzer at all, and "that the detonator was a hunting cartridge and would not detonate any known explosives", according to a publication in Russian local newspaper

The type of explosives controversy

It was initially reported by the FSB that the explosives used by the terrorists was RDX (or "hexogen"). However, it was officially declared later that the explosive was not RDX, but a mixture of aluminum powder, niter (saltpeter), sugar, and TNT prepared by the perpetrators in a concrete mixer at a fertilizer factory in Urus-Martan, Chechnya. RDX is produced in only one factory in Russia, in the city of Perm,. According to the book by Satter, the FSB changed the story about the type of explosive, since it was difficult to explain how huge amounts of RDX disappeared from the closely guarded Perm facility.

A military storage with RDX disguised as "sugar"

In March 2000, Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported about a Private Alexei Pinyaev of the 137th Regiment who guarded a military facility near the city of Ryazan. He was surprised to see that "a storehouse with weapons and ammunition" contained sacks with the word "sugar" on them. The two paratroopers cut a hole in one of the bags and made tea with the sugar taken from the bag. But the taste of the tea was terrible. They became suspicious since people were talking about the explosions. The substance turned out to be hexogen. After the newspaper report, FSB officers "descended on Pinyaev's unit", accused them of "divulging a state secret", and told them "You guys can't even imagine what serious business you've got yourselves tangled up in." The regiment later sued Novaya Gazeta for insulting the honor of the Russian Army, since there was no Private Alexei Pinyaev in the regiment, according to their statement. At an FSB press conference Private Pinyayev stated that there was not any hexogen in the 137th sky troops Regiment and that he was hospitalized in December 1999 and no longer visited the range.

Incident in Russian Parliament

On September 13, just hours after the second explosion in Moscow, Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov of the Communist Party made an announcement: "I have just received a report. According to information from Rostov-on-Don, an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night". However, the bombing in Volgodonsk took place three days later, on September 16. When the Volgodonsk bombing happened, Vladimir Zhirinovsky demanded an explanation in the Duma, but Seleznev turned his microphone off.

Two years later, in March 2002, Seleznyov claimed in an interview that he had been referring to an unrelated hand grenade-based explosion, which did not kill anyone and did not destroy any buildings, and which indeed happened in Volgodonsk. It remains unclear why Seleznyov reported such an insignificant incident to the Russian Parliament and why he did not explain the misunderstanding to Zhirinovsky and other Duma members.

FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko described this as "the usual Kontora mess up": "Moscow-2 was on the 13th and Volgodonsk on 16th, but they got it to the speaker the other way around," he said. Investigator Mikhail Trepashkin confirmed that the man who gave Seleznev the note was indeed an FSB officer.

Sealing of all materials by Russian state officials

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident.. Kremlin administration sealed all materials related to the Ryazan incident for the next 75 years and forbade an investigation into what happened .

Arrest of independent investigator Trepashkin

The commission of Sergei Kovalev asked lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin to investigate the case. Trepashkin found that the basement of one of the bombed buildings was rented by FSB officer Vladimir Romanovich and that the latter was witnessed by several people. However, Trepashkin was unable to bring the evidence to court, because he was arrested by FSB in October 2003 (imprisoned in Nizhny Tagil), allegedly for "disclosing state secrets", just a few days before he was to make his findings public. He was sentenced by a military closed court to four years imprisonment. Amnesty International issued a statement that "there are serious grounds to believe that Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested and convicted under falsified criminal charges which may be politically motivated, in order to prevent him continuing his investigative and legal work related to the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and other cities". Romanovich subsequently died in a hit and run accident in Cyprus. According to Trepashkin, his supervisors and people from the FSB promised not to arrest him if he left the Kovalev commission and started working with the FSB "against Alexander Litvinenko". Commission chairman Kovalev summarized their findings as follows: "What can I tell? We can prove only one thing: there was no training exercise in the city of Ryazan. Authorities do not want to answer any questions..."

On December 10, 2006 Trepashkin wrote a letter to newspaper Novaya Gazeta where he claimed that the officials of the Regional Directorate against the Organized Crimes (RUOP) of Main Directorate of the Internal Affairs (GUVD) in Moscow arrested several people who were questioned in regards of buying and selling RDX. Soon after the arrest several officials from the N.P.Petrushev Directorate of FSB came to the headquarters of the GUVD on Shabolovka street, took all of the material evidences, and ordered to fire all the officials that conducted the arrest. Later sometime in 2000 Trepashkin had meetings with several of the high-ranking officers from the RUOP that disclosed him the whole story. They offered the videocassette containing the footage that led to the arrest of the RDX dealers and offered to appear in court as witnesses. Trepashkin never publicized that to the Public Commission of the State Duma headed by Kovalev to avoid further involvement of the state security services. A similar videocassette possessed Aleksandr Litvinenko with whom Trepashkin contacted as well. Soon thereafter Trepashkin was arrested as a bandit and thrown in a car under a Chechen handgun loaded with seven bullets of the FSB officials which were accusing him in a plot against the Prsident of the Russian Federation and was taken to the city of Dmitrov. The whole court process in regards to the bombings took place without him and behind the closed doors to avoid the information leak. Trepashkin was surprised how the officials of FSB found out about his investigations and became suspicious of couple of journalists with whom he conducted his investigations Levitov (survivability of whom he doubted) and V.V.Shebalin. Trepashkin later found that the latter disclosed everything to D.A.Paramonov, the member of FSB.

Soon the controversial Litvinenko affair took place also. In January 2002 after the Shebalin's statement FSB confiscated the Trepashkin's PC where he had the last evidences of his investigations. After the FSB was not able to open the encrypted evidences in Trepashkin's computer they illegally destroyed it.

Publications about advanced planning of the bombings

On June 6, 1999, three months before the bombings, Swedish journalist Jan Blomgren wrote in newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that one of options considered by the Kremlin leaders was "a series of terror bombings in Moscow that could be blamed on the Chechens."

On July 22, Moscow newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda published leaked documents about an operation, "Storm in Moscow", which, by organizing terrorist acts to cause chaos, would bring about a state of emergency, thus saving the Yeltsin regime.

Russian Duma member Konstantin Borovoi said that he had been "warned by an agent of Russian military intelligence of a wave of terrorist bombings" prior to the blasts.

A Finnish journalist who in mid-August 1999, before the bombings, travelled to the village of Karamakhi in Dagestan, interviewed some villagers and their military Commander General Dzherollak. The journalist wrote: "The Wahhabis' trucks go all over Russia. Even one wrong move in Moscow or Makhachkala, they warn, will lead to bombs and bloodshed everywhere." According to the journalist the Wahhabis had told him, "if they start bombing us, we know where our bombs will explode." In the last days of August, Russian military launched an aerial bombing of the villages.

Claims and denials of responsibility for the blasts

Claims of responsibility

An unknown group, protesting against growing consumerism in Russia, claimed responsibility for the first blast at a Moscow mall. A note was found at the site of the explosion from the group, calling itself the Revolutionary Writers, according to the FSB.

On September 9, an anonymous person, speaking with a Caucasian accent, phoned the Interfax news agency, saying that the blasts in Moscow and Buynaksk were "our response to the bombings of civilians in the villages in Chechnya and Dagestan."

On September 15, an unidentified man, again speaking with a Caucasian accent, called the ITAR-TASS news agency, claiming to represent a group called the Liberation Army of Dagestan Russian officials from both the Interior Ministry and FSB, at the time, expressed skepticism over the claims. Sergei Bogdanov, of the FSB press service in Moscow, said that the words of a previously unknown individual representing a semi-mythical organization should not be considered as reliable. Mr. Bogdanov insisted that the organization had nothing to do with the bombing. On September 15, 1999 a Dagestani official also denied the existence of a "Dagestan Liberation Army".

Denials

Chechen president Aslan Maskahdob and warlords Ibn Al-Khattab and Shamil Basayev denied involvement in the bombings. On September 2, Al-Khattab announced: "The mujahideen of Dagestan are going to carry out reprisals in various places across Russia.", but Khattab later denied responsibility in the blasts, adding that he is fighting the Russian army, not women and children.

Shamil Basayev asserted "the latest blast in Moscow is not our work, but the work of the Dagestanis. Russia has been openly terrorizing Dagestan, it encircled three villages in the centre of Dagestan, did not allow women and children to leave".

Official investigation

Main article: List of people allegedly involved in Russian apartment bombings

In September 1999, hundreds of Chechen residents (out of the more than 100,000 permanently living in Moscow) were briefly detained and interrogated in Moscow, as a wave of anti-Chechen sentiments swept the city. All of them turned out to be innocent.

The official investigation was concluded in 2002. According to the Russian State Prosecutor office, all apartment bombings were executed under command of ethnic Karachay Achemez Gochiyayev. The operations were planned by Ibn al-Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif, Arab militants fighting in Chechnya on the side of Chechen insurgents. Both Russia and USA accuse Al-Khattab of having direct links with Al-Qaida,, though Khattab himself has always denied this. Al-Khattab and al-Saif were later killed during the Second Chechen War. The planning was carried out in Khattab's guerilla camps in Chechnya, "Caucasus" in Shatoy and "Taliban" in Avtury, according to the prosecution. Gochiyaev's group was trained at Chechen rebel bases in the towns of Serzhen-Yurt and Urus-Martan. The group's "technical instructors" were two Arab field commanders, Abu Umar and Abu Djafar, Al-Khattab was the bombings' brainchild. The explosives were prepared at a fertilizer factory in Urus-Martan Chechnya, by mixing sugar, aluminium powder, ammonium nitrate, RDX and TNT in a concrete mixer, From there they were sent to a food storage facility in Kislovodsk, which was managed by an uncle of one of the terrorists, Yusuf Krymshakhalov. Another conspirator, Ruslan Magayayev, leased a KamAZ truck in which the sacks were stored for two months. After everything was planned, the participants were organized into several groups which then transported the explosives to different cities.

Court ruling on events in Moscow

Al-Khattab paid Gochiyayev $500,000 to carry out the attacks at Guryanova Street, Kashirskoye Skosse, and Borsovskiye Prudy, and then helped to hide Gochiyayev and his accomplices in Chechnya. In early September, 1999, Magayayev, Krymshamkhalov, Batchayev and Dekkushev reloaded the cargo into a Mercedes-Benz 2236 trailer and delivered it to Moscow. En route, they were protected from possible complications by an accomplice, Khakim Abayev, who accompanied the trailer in another car. In Moscow they were met by Achemez Gochiyayev, who registered in Hotel Altai under the fake name "Laipanov", and Denis Saitakov. The explosives were left in a warehouse in Ulitsa Krasnodonskaya, which was leased by pseudo-Laipanov (Gochiyayev.) The next day, the explosives were delivered in "ZIL-5301" vans to three addresses – Ulitsa Guryanova, Kashirskoye Shosse and Ulitsa Borisovskiye Prudy, where pseudo-Laipanov leased cellars. Gochiyayev supervised the placement of the bombs in the rented cellars. Next followed the explosions at the former two addresses. The explosion at 16 Borisovskiye Prudy was prevented. Batchayev and Krymshakhalov admitted transporting a truckload of explosives to Moscow but said "they have never been in touch with Chechen warlords and did not know Gochiyaev". They said that someone "who posed as a jihad leader had duped them into the operation" by hiring them to transport his explosives, and they later realized this man was working for the FSB. They claimed that bombings were directed by German Ugryumov who supervised the FSB Alpha and Vympel special forces units at that time.

Court ruling on events in Buinaksk

The 4 September Buinaksk bombings were ordered by Al-Khattab, who promised the bombers $300,000 to drive their truck bombs into the center of the compound, which would have destroyed four apartment buildings simultaneously. However, the bombers parked on an adjacent street instead and blew up only one building. At the trial they complained that Khattab had not given them all the money he owed them. One of the bombers confessed working for Al-Khattab, but claimed he did not know the explosives were intended to blow up the military apartment buildings.

Court ruling on events in Volgodonsk

According to Dekkushev's confession he, together with Krymshamkhalov and Batchayev, prepared the explosives, transported them to Volgodonsk, and randomly picked the apartment building on Octyabrskoye Shosse to blow up. Abu Omar had promised to pay him for the job, but Dekkushev never got a single kopeck. According to Dekkushev, it wasn't the FSB that ordered the bombing, as Berezovsky later claimed, but the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Sentences

Two members of Gochiyayev's group, which had carried out the attacks, Adam Dekkushev and Yusuf Crymshamhalov, have both been sentenced to life terms in a special-regime colony. Both defendants have pleaded guilty only to some of the charges. For instance, Dekkushev acknowledged that he knew the explosives he transported were to be used for an act of terror. Dekkushev also confirmed Gochiyaev's role in the attacks. Dekkushev was extradited to Russia on April 14, 2002 to stand trial. Crymshamhalov was apprehended and extradicted to Moscow. In 2000, six bombers involved in the Buynaksk attack were arrested in Azerbaijan and convicted of the bombing. Achemez Gochiyaev remains a fugitive, and is under an international search warrant. In a statement released in January, 2004, the FSB said, "until we arrest Gochiyayev, the investigation of the apartment bloc bombings of 1999 will not be finished."

Attempts at independent investigation

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident.

An independent public commission to investigate the bombings, which was chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev, was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, both Duma members, have since died in apparent assassinations in April 2003 and July 2003, respectively. Another member of the commission, Otto Lacis, was assaulted in November 2003 and two years later, on November 3, 2005, he died in a hospital after a car accident.. Commission chairman Kovalev summarized their findings in 2008: "What can I tell? We are completely certain that there was no any training exercise in the city of Ryazan. Authorities do not want to answer any our requests, although this is the only way to dispell the suspicions"

The commission asked lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin to investigate the case. By studying old press releases, Trepashkin had found a composite sketch of the man who rented the basement where the explosives were kept. The sketch was released after September 9. Two days latter, the newspapers published an image of a different person, Achemez Gochiyayev. Trepashkin and several other people recognized the first image as Vladimir Romanovich, an undercover FSB agent who specialized in penetrating ethnic Caucasian criminal groups. Romanovich subsequently died in a hit and run accident in Cyprus in the summer 2000. However, in 2009 Russian Novaya Gazeta published a note, which stated that Romanovich died more than a year before the apartment bombings took place, without noticing the reason and exact date of his death

Trepashkin was unable to bring any evidence to the court because he was arrested in October 2003, just a few days shortly before he was to make his findings public. He was sentenced by a Moscow military court to four years imprisonment for disclosing state secrets. Amnesty International issued a statement that "there are serious grounds to believe that Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested and convicted under false criminal charges which may be politically motivated, in order to prevent him continuing his investigative and legal work related to the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and other cities". According to Trepashkin, his supervisors and the people from the FSB promised not to arrest him if he left the Kovalev commission and started working together with the FSB "against Alexander Litvinenko".

On March 24, 2000, two days before the presidential elections, NTV Russia featured the Ryazan events of Fall 1999 in the talk show Independent Investigation. The talk with the residents of the Ryazan apartment building along with FSB public relations director Alexander Zdanovich and Ryazan branch head Alexander Sergeyev was filmed few days earlier. On March 26 Boris Nemtsov voiced his concern over the possible shut-down of NTV for airing the talk. Seven months later NTV general manager Igor Malashenko said at the JFK School of Government that Information Minister Mikhail Lesin warned him on several occasions. Mr. Malashenko's recollection of Mr. Lesin's warning was that by airing the talk show NTV "crossed the line" and that the NTV managers were "outlaws" in the eyes of the Kremlin. According to Alexander Goldfarb, Mr. Malashenko told him that Valentin Yumashev brought a warning from the Kremlin, one day before airing the show, promising in no uncertain terms that the NTV managers "should consider themselves finished" if they went ahead with the broadcast.(Goldfarb & Litvinenko 2007, p. 198)

Artyom Borovik told Grigory Yavlinsky that Borovik investigated the Moscow apartment bombings and prepared a series of publications about them. Mr. Borovik received numerous death threats, and he died in an airplane crash in March 2000.

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former security service member Alexander Litvinenko, who investigated the bombings, were killed in 2006.

Surviving victims of the Guryanova street bombing asked President Dmitry Medvedev to resume the investigation in 2008.

Theory of Russian government conspiracy

Yury Felshtinsky, Alexander Litvinenko, David Satter, Boris Kagarlitsky, Vladimir Pribylovsky, the secessionist Chechen authorities claimed that the 1999 bombings were a false flag attack coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya, which boosted Prime Minister and former FSB Director Vladimir Putin's popularity, and brought the pro-war Unity Party to the State Duma and Putin to the presidency within a few months.

According to the theory, the bombings were a successful coup d'état organized by the FSB to bring future Russian president Vladimir Putin to power. Some of them described the bombings as typical "active measures" practiced by the KGB in the past. David Satter stated, during his testimony in the United States House of Representatives, "With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, however, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination. For “Operation Successor” to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September, 1999 of the apartment building bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed 300 lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution."

According to Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky the bombings were ordered by future Russian president Vladimir Putin through the chain of command that included director of Russian FSB agency Nikolai Patrushev, FSB General German Ugryumov who supervised the special forces Alpha and Vympel units at this time and several groups of FSB and GRU operatives. The team in Moscow included FSB officers Vladimir Romanovich, Ramazan Dyshekov and Maxim Lazovsky, an FSB officer who was also involved in staging of bombings in Moscow in 1994, according to authors. Ethnic Karachai Achemez Gochiyaev rented the apartment basements as storage spaces on request from the FSB agent Ramazan Dyshekov..

The September 4 attack in Buynaksk was allegedly conducted by a sabotage unit of twelve Russian GRU officers who acted on the orders of Colonel-General Valentin Korabelnikov. They referred to a controversial testimony of GRU officer Aleksey Galkin recorded by Robert Young Pelton in December 1999, when he was a prisoner of the Chechen rebels. .

Adam Dekkushev, Yusuf Krymshakhalov, and Timur Batchaev were recruited by undercover FSB agents to deliver explosives disguised as bags of sugar to Volgodonsk and Moscow. The Chechens believed that apartment buildings were merely temporarily storage places, and that the explosives would be used against federal military targets.

FSB team in the city of Ryazan included three agents (two men and a women) who wher caught after the "training exercise". Their identities and fate remains unknown although their photos were advertised on Russian television.

Additional independent investigations

Maura Reynolds from Los Angeles Times investigated Ryazan events by interviewing and quoting Alexei Kartofelnikov, one of the 2 residents who persisted in calling militia, Tatyana Borycheva, Tatyana Lukichyova, also residents, Lt. Col. Sergei Kabashov, Yuri Bludov, the spokesman for the regional FSB.

Helen Womack from The Independent quoted Alexei Kartofelnikov's daughter Yulia, police officer Major Vladimir Golev, Lt. Col. of the Ryazan police Sergei Kabashov.

John Sweeney a journalist at Observer, later for BBC, quoted Vladimir Vasiliev, one of the 2 Ryazan apartment residents who tipped militsia, an "inspector" "from the local police" Andrei Chernyshev, "grandmother Clara Stepanovna", "head of the local bomb squad" Yuri Tkachenko, head of the regional FSB Alexander Sergeyev and others.

Statements in support

U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John McCain said that there remained "credible allegations that Russia's FSB had a hand in carrying out these [Moscow apartment bombing] attacks".

Paul Khlebnikov wrote that former Security Council chief Alexandr Lebed in his February 17, 1997 interview with Le Figaro was almost convinced that the government organized the terrorist attacks against its own citizens.

According to Johann Hari, "the FSB is simply the renamed KGB, whose raison d'etre for decades was essentially institutional terror in the service of the government. Putin is himself an ex-KGB man, and he has twice blocked, through the Duma, any independent investigation into the bombings. No evidence of Chechen involvement has ever been forthcoming, and the Chechen groups have claimed that they were not responsible — although they admit to other acts of violence. The Ryazan "training exercise" excuse is preposterous. It does seem to suggest that the Russian secret services were caught red-handed".

Criticism

Officials

In 2000, Russia's President Vladimir Putin dismissed the allegations of FSB involvement in the bombings as "delirious nonsense." "There are no people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such crime against their own people. The very allegation is immoral," he said. An FSB spokesman said that "Litvinenko's evidence cannot be taken seriously by those who are investigating the bombings".

Analysts

Sergei Markov, an advisor to the Russian government, criticized the film Assassination of Russia which supported the FSB involvement theory. Markov said that the film was "a well-made professional example of the propagandist and psychological war that Boris Berezovsky is notoriously good at." Markov found parallels between the film and the conspiracy theory that the United States and/or Israel organized the 9/11 attacks to justify military actions.

According to researcher Gordon Bennett, the conspiracy theory that the FSB was behind the bombings is kept alive by the Russian oligarch and Kremlin-critic Boris Berezovsky. Bennett points out that neither Berezovsky nor his team (which includes Alexander Litvinenko) have provided any evidence to support their claims. In the BBC World Hard Talk interview on 8 May 2002, Berezovsky was also unable to present any evidence for his claims, and he did not suggest he was in possession of such evidence which he would be ready to present in a court. Bennett also points out that Putin's critics often forget that the decision to send troops to Chechnya was taken by Boris Yeltsin — not Vladimir Putin — with the wholehearted support of all power structures.

Professor Richard Sakwa has commented on the claims of Berezovsky and Litvinenko, saying that the evidence they presented was at best circumstanstial.

Dr. Mike Bowker, from the University of East Anglia, has said that the inference that the bombings were carried out by the Russian authorities is uncorrobated by evidence. According to Bowker, the theory also ignores the history of Chechen terrorism and public threats by various Chechen rebels following their defeat in Dagestan – which included Khattab telling a Czech and a German newspaper, a few days before the bombings in Moscow, that "Russian women and children will pay for the crimes of Russian generals." and that "this will not happen tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow"

Dr. Vlad Sobell has pointed out that the proponents of the theory that the second invasion of Chechnya was a plot by Putin to get elected regularly ignore the key fact that Putin's attack on Chechnya in 1999 was preceded by a Chechen insurrection in Dagestan, whose objective was to turn it into another unstable Chechnya.

According to Associate Professor Henry E. Hale of Harvard University, one thing that remains unclear about the "FSB did it" theory: If the motive was to get an FSB-friendly man installed as president, why would the FSB have preferred Putin, a little-known "upstart" who had leapt to the post of FSB director through outside political channels, to Primakov, who was certainly senior in stature and pedigree and who was also widely reputed to have a KGB past?

According to Dr. Robert Bruce Ware of Southern Illinois University, the best explanation for the apartment block blasts is that they were perpetrated by Wahhabis under the leadership of Khattab, as retribution for the federal attacks on Karamachi, Chabanmakhi, and Kadar. "If the blasts were organized by Khattab and other Wahhabis as retribution for the federal attacks on Dagestan's Islamic Djamaat, then this would explain the timing of the attacks, and why there were no attacks after the date on which fighting in Dagestan was concluded. It would explain why no Chechen claimed responsibility. It would account for Basayev's reference to Dagestani responsibility, and it would be consistent with Khattab's vow to set off bombs everywhere... blasting through [Russian] cities."

Dr. Kirill Pankratov, in a 2003 letter to the Johnson's Russia List, spoke against Satter's and Putley's theory. He noted that 1) there was no need for "another pretext for military operation in Chechnya at the time of the Ryazan incident", but there were already a "plenty of reasons for decisive military response", 2) the FSB of other security service was institutionally incapable of such a conspiracy after years of decline in the 1990s, 3) the conspirators were not actually trying to blow a building up in Ryazan; however, their sloppy actions are "consistent with the training exercise version of events", 4) the FSB did not have to declare the incident a "training exercise", but "it was much easier to show great relief... and continue trying to find the perpetrators of the bombing attempt."

Security and policy analysts Simon Saradzhyan and Nabi Abdullaev noted that Litvinenko and Felshtinsky did not provide any direct evidence to back up their claims about FSB involvement in the bombings.

Andrey Soldatov is skeptical about Mikhail Trepashkin's awareness of the details of the Russian apartment bombings. According to Soldatov, the Russian government's suppression of the discussion of the FSB involvment theory reflects paranoia rather than guilt on its part. He points out that, ironically, the paranoia produced the conspiracy theories that the government was keen to stamp out.

In 2009, Russian journalist and radio host Yulia Latynina, commenting on Scott Anderson's article "Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power" noted that deaths of Sergey Yushenkov and Yury Schekochihin "in any case, had no relation to bombings in Moscow". Latynina opined, that the version that FSB did the bombings was not only absurd, but purposefully invented by Berezovsky after he was deprived of the power. Her major argument was, that since Berezovsky was one of the key figures to push Putin into the power, he knew for certain the theory was wrong. If Berezovsky felt that "there are some people else beyond Putin, some fearsome siloviks who can explode houses, they [the Family] would throw Putin away, as a hot potato".

Paul J. Murphy, a former US counterterrorism expert stated that "the evidence that Al-Khattab was responsible for the apartment building bombings in Moscow is clear". Murphy also states "the findings by the Russian government prove that the Liberation Army of Dagestan, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, is the same as Al-Khattab's Islamic Army of Dagestan, which launched the invasion of Dagestan from Chechnya in August, 1999".

Professor Peter Reddaway and researcher Dmitri Glinski described the involvement of the Liberation Army of Dagestan as the best explanation for the bombings.

Chronology of events of June-October of 1999

• June 18, — attacks on two pickets of Interior troops at the Chechnya-Dagestan were performed from the side of Chechnya, as well as offense against a company of Cossacks in Stavropol Krai took place. Russian authorities closed most of checkpoints on the Chechen border.
• June 23, — shooting of an Interior troops picket at Pervomaiskoe village of Khasavyurtovsky District in Dagestan from Chechnya.
• July 23, — Chechen militants attacked an Interior troops pictet in Dagestan which defended Kopaevsky Hydro Scheme. MVD of Dagestan claimed that "this time Chechens performed a reconnaissance in force, and soon large scale actions by armed gangs will take place along the whole Dagestan-Chechen border."
• July 29, — Aslan Maskhadov accused Western security services of exacerbating tensions at Chechen-Dagestan border.
• August 1, — Dagestani Wahhabis and Chechens who supported them claimed that Sharia governing was introduced in Dagestan.
• August 2, — first clashes in Tsumadinsky District of Dagestan between local Wahhabis and militia moved from Makhachkala.
• August 7, — massive intrusion into Dagestan from Chechnya by Chechen militants under the command of deputy commander in chief of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Basayev and field commander Khattab (400 people).
• August 9, — heads of Shura of Muslims of Chechnya and Dagestan Shamil Basayev, Dokku Umarov, Khattab, Adallo Mukhammed declared establishment of an independent Islamic state of Dagestan, which included settlements in Tsumadinsky and Botlikhsky districts captured by militants . An unofficial television studio started operating in Chechnya and broadcasting video recordings of events in Tsumadinsky and Botlikhsky Districts, calls to jihad and other kind of Wahhabi propaganda on Khasaviurtovsky District and Kizilyurtovsky District of Dagestan .
• August 9, — Sergey Stepashin was dismissed from the position of the chairman of the Russian Government, and Vladimir Putin was appointed instead of him.
• August 22 1999: The forces of Smamil Basyev withdrew back into Chechnya
• September 4 1999: Bombing in Buynaksk, 64 people killed, 133 are injured.
• September 9 1999: Bombing in Moscow, Pechatniki, 94 people are killed, 249 are injured.
• September 13 1999: Bombing in Moscow, Kashirskoye highway, 118 are killed.
• September 13 1999: A bomb was defused and a warehouse containing several tons of explosives and six timing devices have been found in Moscow.
• September 13 1999: Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov made an announcement about bombing of an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk that took place only three days later, on September 16.
• September 16 1999: Bombing in Volgodonsk, 18 are killed, 288 injured.
• September 23 1999: An apartment bomb was found in the city of Ryazan. Vladimir Rushailo announced that police prevented a terrorist act. Vladimir Putin praised the vigilance of the citizens and called for the air bombing of Grozny.
• September 24 1999: FSB agent who planted the bomb in Ryazan were caught by local police. Nikolai Patrushev declared that the incident was a training exercise.
• September 24 1999: Second Chechen War begins.

Books and films about the bombings

David Satter, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, authored a book Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State(Satter 2003) that scrutinized the paradoxes surrounding the bombings.

In 2002 former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and historian Yuri Felshtinsky published a book FSB vzryvaet Rossiyu (FSB is blowing up Russia). It was later translated into English under the title Blowing up Russia: Terror from within.(Felshtinsky & Litvinenko 2007) The book alleged that the bombings and other terrorist acts have been committed by Russian security services to justify the Second Chechen War and to bring Vladimir Putin to power.

In a subsequent book, Lubyanka Criminal Group(Litvinenko 2002), Litvinenko and Alexander Goldfarb described the transformation of the FSB into a criminal and terrorist organization. GRU defector and author Viktor Suvorov said that the Litvinenko's book Lubyanka Criminal Group describes "a leading criminal group that provides "protection" for all other organized crime in the country and which continues the criminal war against their own people", like their predecessors NKVD and KGB. He added: "The book proves: Lubyanka [the KGB headquarters] was taken over by enemies of the people. (Is it possible to call them friends of people, them who put their own people on the needle and blow up sleeping children?). If Putin's team can not disprove the facts provided by Litvinenko, Putin must shoot himself. Patrushev and all other leadership of Lubyanka Criminal Group must follow his example."

A documentary film Assassination of Russia was made in 2000 by two French producers who had previously worked on NTV's Sugar of Ryazan program.(Goldfarb & Litvinenko 2007, pp. 249–250)

A documentary Nedoverie ("Disbelief") about the bombing controversy made by Russian director Andrei Nekrasov was premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. The film chronicles the story of Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, the two Russian-American sisters, who had lost their mother in the attack, and decided to find out who did it.

Alexander Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko published a book Death of a Dissident.(Goldfarb & Litvinenko 2007) They asserted that the murder of Mr. Litvinenko was "the most compelling proof" of the FSB involvement theory. According to the book, the murder of Litvinenko "gave credence to all his previous theories, delivering justice for the tenants of the bombed apartment blocks, the Moscow theater-goers, Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, and Anna Politkovskaya, and the half-exterminated nation of Chechnya, exposing their killers for the whole world to see."(Goldfarb & Litvinenko 2007, p. 259)

Writer Alexander Prokhanov authored a political thriller Mr. Hexogen which describes the bombings as a "chekist electoral technique".

Yuli Dubov, author of The Big Slice, wrote a novel The Lesser Evil, based on the bombings. The main characters of the story are Platon (Boris Berezovsky) and Larry (Badri Patarkatsishvili). They struggle against an evil KGB officer, Old man (apparently inspired by the legendary Philipp Bobkov), who brings another KGB officer, Fedor Fedorovich (Vladimir Putin) to power by staging a series of apartment bombings.

See also

• List of deaths related to Russian apartment bombings
• "Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power" controversy

Bibliography

• Khlebnikov, Paul (2000), Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the looting of Russia, Harcourt, p. 400, ISBN 9780151006212
• Goldfarb, Alexander; Litvinenko, Marina (2007), Death of a Dissident, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 9781416551652
• Felshtinsky, Yuri; Litvinenko, Alexander (2007), Blowing up Russia: Terror from within (2nd ed.), Gibson Square Books, ISBN 9781903933954 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |other= ignored (|others= suggested) (help)
• Satter, David (2003), Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-09892-8
• Felshtinsky, Yuri; Pribylovsky, Vladimir (2008), The Age of Assassins. The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin, London: Gibson Square Books, ISBN 9781906142070
• Litvinenko, Alexander (2002), LPG: Lubianskaia Prestupnaia Gruppirovka: Ofitser FSB Daet Pokazaniia (in Russian), Grani, p. 255, ISBN 9780972387804
• Evangelista, Matthew (2002), The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union?, Brookings Institution Press, ISBN 9780815724995
• Jack, Andrew (2005), Inside Putin's Russia: Can There Be Reform Without Democracy?, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195189094
• Sakwa, Richard (2005), Checnya: From Past to Future, Anthem Press, ISBN 9781843311645
• Sakwa, Richard (2008), Putin, Russia's choice (2nd ed.), Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-40765-6
• Reddaway, Peter (2001), The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy, United States Institute of Peace Press, ISBN 1-929223-06-4 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)