Difference between revisions of "Russian apartment bombings"

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Revision as of 06:06, 27 June 2014

Event.png Russian apartment bombings (False flag attack) Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
4
Apartment bombing.jpg
Date4 September 1999 - 16 September 1999
TypeBombing.jpg Time bombings
Deaths293
Injured (non-fatal)More than 1,000"Morethan" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 1000.
Exposed byAlexander Litvinenko
Interest ofArtyom Borovik, Kovalev commission, Sergei Kovalev, David Satter
Subpage•Russian apartment bombings/Premature death
DescriptionA 'Russian 9/11' which boosted supported for the war that was launched in Chchnya (on whom the attacks were blamed)

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 293 people and injuring 651. The explosions occurred in Buynaksk on 4 September, Moscow on 9 and 13 September, and Volgodonsk on 16 September. Several other bombs were defused in Moscow at the time.

Official Narrative

The Russian government blamed the bombings on Chechnyan separatists, and initially this was widely believed; public support for a full scale war on Chechnya grew. In a foreshadowing of the effect of the later 9-11 event, domestic support for former FSB Director Vladimir Putin grew, assisting his appointment as acting president of Russia on December 31, 1999.

Ryazan Incident

A similar bomb was found and defused in the Russian city of Ryazan on 22 September 1999. Two days later Federal Security Service (FSS) Director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the Ryazan incident had been a training exercise.[1] This led some, such as Alexander Litvinenko and Boris Berezovsky and the secessionist Chechen authorities to blame the apartment bombings on the FSB.

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.[2] When arrested, the detainees produced FSB identification cards. They were soon released on orders from Moscow.[3][4]

At 8:30 P.M. on 22 September, 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.[5][6][7] 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.[8] 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 analyser. The device detected traces of RDX, the military explosive used in all previous bombings.[9] 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 23 September, the explosive engineers took a bit of substance from the suspicious-looking sacks to a firing ground located some kilometres away from Ryazan for testing.[10] During the substance tests at that area they tried to explode it by means of a detonator, but their efforts failed, the substance was not detonated, and the explosion did not occur.[10][11][12][13] 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.[14] 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[10][11][12][13][15][16]

On 24 September, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the exercise was carried out to test responses after the earlier blasts.[17] The Ryazan FSB "reacted with fury" and issued a statement saying:[18]

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

Parliamentary miss statement

On 13 September, 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".[19][20][21][22] However, the bombing in Volgodonsk took place three days later, on 16 September. When the Volgodonsk bombing happened, Vladimir Zhirinovsky demanded an explanation in the Duma, but Seleznev turned his microphone off.[19] Vladimir Zhirinovsky said in the Russian Duma: "Remember, Gennadiy Nikolaevich, how you told us that a house has been blown up in Volgodonsk, three days prior to the blast? How should we interpret this? The State Duma knows that the house was destroyed on Monday, and it has indeed been blown up on Thursday [same week]... How come... the state authorities of Rostov region were not warned in advance [about the future bombing], although it was reported to us? Everyone is sleeping, the house was destroyed three days later, and now we must take urgent measures..." [Seleznev turned his microphone off].[23]

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.[24][25] 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.[24]

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.[26]

Attempts at investigation

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident.[27][28]

Kovalev Commission

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.[29][30]

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.[31][32] Another member of the commission, Otto Lacis, was assaulted in November 2003[33] and two years later, on 3 November 2005, he died in a hospital after a car accident.[34]

The commission asked lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin to investigate the case. Mr. Trepashkin reports that the FSB promised not to arrest him, his supervisors and staff if he left the Kovalev commission and started working together with the FSB "against Alexander Litvinenko".[35] Trepashkin declined and kept working, uncovering evidence 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. Mr. Trepashkin was unable to bring the alleged evidence to the court because shortly before he was to make his findings public he was arrested in October 2003 for illegal arms possession.[36] He was sentenced by a Moscow military court to four years imprisonment for disclosing state secrets.[37] 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".[38] Romanovich subsequently died in a hit and run accident in Cyprus.[citation needed]

More killings of dissenting voices

Artyom Borovik told Grigory Yavlinsky that Borovik investigated the Moscow apartment bombings and prepared a series of publications about them.[39] Mr. Borovik received numerous death threats, and he died in an aeroplane crash in March 2000.[40]

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya who blamed the FSB for the bombings, was gunned down in front od her apartment in 2006, while former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who came to a similar conclusion, was poisoned with polonium, also in 2006.[41]

Sealing of all materials by Russian Duma

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident.[27][28] The Duma, on a pro-Kremlin party-line vote, voted to seal all materials related to the Ryazan incident for the next 75 years and forbade an investigation into what happened.

 

Related Document

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Document:The Global Drugs Meta-GrouparticleOctober 2005Peter Dale Scott

 

The Official Culprits

NameDescription
ChechnyaMuslim majority region of Russia, in the Caucasus mountains.
Adam DekkushevAccording to Dekkushev, it wasn't the FSB that ordered the bombing, as Boris Berezovsky later claimed, but the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
Yusuf Krymshakhalov
Ibn al-KhattabPoisoned and named by the FSB as the organiser of the 1999 Russian apartment bombings.


Rating

4star.png 26 August 2016 Robin  A good introduction to this rather sidelined event
Understanding this event - carried out while Putin was FSB premier - is an easy way to understand why the Russians have not exposed 9-11. And if the Russians have chosen not to, do you see any other national governments doing so?
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References

  1. ↑ Ответ Генпрокуратуры на депутатский запрос о взрывах в Москве (in Russian), machine translation.
  2. ↑ Russia's terrorist bombings, WorldNetDaily, 27 January 2000
  3. ↑ The Shadow of Ryazan: Is Putin’s government legitimate?, National Review Online, 30 April 2002
  4. ↑ {{URL|example.com|optional display text}}
  5. ↑ Fears of Bombing Turn to Doubts for Some in Russia, Maura Reynolds, Los Angeles Times, 15 January 2000
  6. ↑ Did Alexei stumble across Russian agents planting a bomb to justify Chechen war?, Helen Womack, The Independent, 27 January 2000
  7. ↑ The Fifth Bomb: Did Putin's Secret Police Bomb Moscow in a Deadly Black Operation?, John Sweeney, Cryptome, 24 November 2000
  8. ↑ Goldfarb & Litvinenko 2007
  9. ↑ Satter 2003, p. 65
  10. ↑ a b c Таймер остановили за семь часов до взрыва: Теракт предотвратил водитель автобуса, Sergey Topol, Nadezhda Kurbacheva, Kommersant, 24 September 1999 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "ReferenceA" defined multiple times with different content
  11. ↑ a b terror1999.narod.ru/ryazan/press/ort230999.html
  12. ↑ a b old.russ.ru/politics/news/1999/09/23.htm
  13. ↑ a b http://www.chas-daily.com/win/1999/09/24/v_42.html
  14. ↑ (in Russian) ORT newscast on 23.09.99, at 09:00
  15. ↑ "Б Пняяхх: Пъгюмяйхи Яюуюп Цейянцемю Ме Яндепфхр". Lenta.ru. Retrieved 29 January 2012.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
  16. ↑ politcom.ru/2002/aaa_skandal20.php
  17. ↑ {{URL|example.com|optional display text}}
  18. ↑ Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West , Palgrave Macmillan (19 February 2008), ISBN 0-230-60612-1, page 25
  19. ↑ a b Death of a Dissident, page 265
  20. ↑ [1][dead link]
  21. ↑ "CDI". CDI. Retrieved 29 January 2012.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
  22. ↑ (in Russian) "Геннадия Селезнева предупредили о взрыве в Волгодонске за три дня до теракта ("Gennadiy Seleznyov was warned of the Volgodonsk explosion three days in advance")". Newsru.com. 21 March 2002.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
  23. ↑ "ФСБ взрывает Россию в библиотеке FictionBook". Fictionbook.ru. Retrieved 29 January 2012.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
  24. ↑ a b "Darkness at Dawn, page 269.
  25. ↑ (in Russian) Reply of the Public Prosecutor Office of the Russian Federation to a deputy inquiry
  26. ↑ Death of a Dissident, page 266
  27. ↑ a b Duma Rejects Move to Probe Ryazan Apartment Bomb, Terror-99, 21 March 2000
  28. ↑ a b Duma Vote Kills Query On Ryazan, The Moscow Times, 4 April 2000
  29. ↑ Putin critic loses post, platform for inquiry, The Baltimore Sun, 11 December 2003
  30. ↑ Russian court rejects action over controversial "anti-terrorist exercise", Interfax, 3 April 2003
  31. ↑ Chronology of events. State Duma Deputy Yushenkov shot dead, Centre for Russian Studies, 17 April 2003
  32. ↑ Worries Linger as Schekochikhin's Laid to Rest, The Moscow Times, 7 July 2003
  33. ↑ (in Russian) В Москве жестоко избит Отто Лацис, NewsRU, 11 November 2003
  34. ↑ (in Russian) Скончался известный российский журналист Отто Лацис, 3 November 2005
  35. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Interview with Mikhail Trepashkin
  36. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named cdi.org
  37. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named coranet.radicalparty.org
  38. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named web.amnesty.org
  39. ↑ (in Russian) Grigory Yavlinsky's interview, TV6 Russia, 11 March 2000 (computer translation)
  40. ↑ Russian crash: search for terrorist link, BBC News, 10 March 2000
  41. ↑ (in Russian) Presidential election is our last chance to learn the truth, Anna Politkovskaya, Novaya Gazeta, № 2, 15 January 2004 (computer translation)
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