Blowing Up Russia (9 page)
Authors: Alexander Litvinenko
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Political Science, #General, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Terrorism, #World, #Russian & Former Soviet Union, #Social Science, #Violence in Society, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Murder
Presumably he was poisoned by the FSB, because he had discovered the identities of the true leaders of Lazovsky s group and realized exactly who had organized the explosions in Moscow. Poisons of a type that could have been used to kill Tskhai were made in a special FSB laboratory, which according to some sources was located at 42 Krasnobogatyrskaya Street in Moscow. The same building is also said to have been used for printing the high-quality counterfeit dollars used by the FSB to pay for contract killings and other counterintelligence operations. The laboratories had been in existence since Soviet times (the dollars were supposed to be printed in case of war).
On April 15, 1997, a funeral service was held for Tskhai at the Cathedral of the Epiphany, and he was buried at the Vagankovskoe Cemetery. After Tskhai s death, the investigation into Lazovsky s group deteriorated into a series of sporadic episodes. At MUR, Lazovsky s case supposedly became the responsibility, by turn, of Pyotr Astafiev, Andrei Potekhin, Igor Travin, V. Budkin, A. Bazanov, G. Boguslavsky, V. Bubnov, and A. Kalinin, and it was also dealt with by the investigator for specially important cases of the Department for the Investigation of Banditry and Murder of the Moscow City Public Prosecutor s Office, Suprunenko, who first interrogated Lazovsky as early as 1996.
When he was released in February 1998, Lazovsky bought himself a luxurious mansion in an elite rural housing estate at Uspenskoe in the Odinovtsovsky district of Podmoskovie (the area round Moscow), which was reached by way of the Rublyovskoe Highway, and then set up a fund for the support of peace in the Caucasus under the title of Unification, in which he took the position of vice-president. Lazovsky continued his collaboration with the secret services. He was kept under observation following his release by Mikhail Fonaryov, an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Moscow district GUVD, but no details are known of his activities during this period.
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Chapter 4
Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev (a biographical note) Whereas during the first Chechen war of 1994-1996, the state security forces had simply been attempting to forestall Russia s development towards a liberal-democratic society, the political goals of the second Chechen war were far more serious: to provoke Russia into war with Chechnya, and to exploit the ensuing commotion to seize power in Russia at the forthcoming presidential elections in 2000. The honor of provoking a war with Chechnya fell to the new director of the FSB, Colonel-General Patrushev.
Patrushev was born in Leningrad on July 11, 1951. In 1974, he graduated from the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute and was assigned to the institute s design office, where he worked as an engineer. Just one year later, in 1975, he was invited to join the KGB, completed the one-year course at the Higher School of the KGB of the USSR, specializing in law, and joined the KGB s Leningrad branch. There, he served as junior operations officer, head of the city agency, deputy head of the regional agency, and head of the service for combating smuggling and corruption of the KGB Department for Leningrad and the Leningrad Region. By 1990 he had risen to the rank of colonel. Until 1991, he was a member of the Communist Party.
In 1990 Patrushev was transferred to Karelia, where he initially served as head of the local counterintelligence department. In 1992, he became the Karelia s Minister of Security. In 1994, when the Leningrader Stepashin became director of the FSK, he called Patrushev to Moscow to serve as head of one of the key divisions in the Lubyanka, the Internal Security Department (USB) of the FSK of the Russian Federation. The USB of the FSK was counterintelligence within counterintelligence, the section which gathered compromising information on the FSK s own personnel. The head of the FSB had always been the FSK/FSB director s most trusted ally, reporting to him directly.
By moving Patrushev to Moscow, Stepashin saved him from the consequences of a serious scandal. In Karelia, Patrushev had gotten into difficulties over the theft and smuggling of precious Karelian birch timber, and the Public Prosecutor s Office of Petrozavodsk had initiated criminal proceedings against him, although he had initially only been a witness in the case. In the course of the investigation, facts had emerged which virtually proved his guilt as an accomplice. It was at this moment that Stepashin transferred Patrushev to a very high position in Moscow, well beyond the reach of the Public Prosecutor s Office of Karelia. Fortunately for Patrushev, the head of the UFSB for the Republic of Karelia, Vasily Ankudinov, who could have told us a great deal about Patrushev and Karelian birch, died at the age of 56 on May 21, 2001.
In June 1995, Mikhail Barsukov replaced Stepashin as head of the FSK. In the summer of 1996, Nikolai Kovalyov replaced Barsukov. Neither Barsukov nor Kovalyov regarded Patrushev as their own man and did nothing to promote him. Then Vladimir Putin, who
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knew Patrushev from Leningrad, became the head of the president s Central Control Department (GKU) and invited his old acquaintance to become his first deputy.
Patrushev moved over to Putin s team.
Patrushev s subsequent rapid professional ascent is linked with Putin s own rise. When Putin became first deputy head of the Kremlin Administration in May 1998, he promoted Patrushev to the vacant position of head of the president s GKU. In October the same year, Patrushev returned to the Lubyanka, initially as Putin s deputy, a post to which he was appointed by Yeltsin in a decree of July 25, 1998, and later as First Deputy Director of the FSB.
On March 29, 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, while leaving him in position as director of the FSB, and on August 9 the same year, Yeltsin appointed Putin Prime Minister of Russia. In summing up the first few months of his administration, Novaya Gazeta wrote: Long, long ago in a highly democratic country an elderly president entrusted the post of chancellor and Prime Minister to a young and energetic successor. Then the Reichstag went up in flames&
Historians have not yet given us an answer to the question of who set fire to it, but history has shown us who benefited. In Russia, however, an elderly Guarantor [of the Constitution] entrusted the post of prime minister to a successor who had yet to be democratically elected. Then apartment blocks were blown up, and a new war began in Chechnya, and this war was glorified by arch-liars.
These events which shook the entire country were also linked with the ascendancy of one other man: on the day Putin became Prime Minister of Russia, Patrushev was given the directorship of the FSB. People with inside knowledge claim that Putin had no choice but to promote Patrushev, because Patrushev was in possession of compromising material about him. On August 17, 1999, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev was appointed director of the Federal Security Service of Russia. And then it began&
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Chapter 5
The FSB fiasco in Ryazan When someone commits a crime, it s very important to catch them while the trail is still hot.
Nikolai Patrushev-about the events in Ryazan. Itogi, 5 October 1999 In September 1999, monstrous acts of terrorism were perpetrated in Buinaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk.
We shall begin with the terrorist attack which could have been the most terrible of them all, if it had not been foiled. On September 22, something unexpected happened: in Ryazan, FSB operatives were spotted planting sugar sacks containing hexogene in the bedroom community of Dashkovo-Pesochnya.
At 9:15 p.m., Alexei Kartofelnikov, a driver for the Spartak soccer club who lived in the single-entrance twelve-story block built more than twenty years earlier at number 14/16 Novosyolov Street, phoned the Dashkovo-Pesochnya office of the Oktyabrsky Region Department of the Interior (ROVD) in Ryazan and reported that ten minutes earlier, he had seen a white model five or seven Zhiguli automobile with the Moscow license plate T534 VT 77 RUS outside the entrance to his apartment block, where there was a twentyfour hour Night and Day shop on the ground floor. The car had driven into the yard and stopped. A man and a young woman got out, went down into the basement of the building, and after a while came back. Then the car was driven right up against the basement door, and all three of the people in it began carrying some kind of sacks inside.
One of the men had a mustache and the woman was wearing a tracksuit. Then all of them got into the car and drove away.
Note how quickly Kartofelnikov reacted. The police were less prompt in their response.
I spotted the model seven Zhiguli as I was walking home from the garage,
Kartofelnikov recalled, and I noticed the license plate out of professional habit. I saw that the regional number had been masked by a piece of paper with the Ryazan serial number 62 . I ran home to phone the police. I dialed 02 and got this lazy reply: call such-and-such a number. I called it, and it was busy. I had to keep dialing the number for ten minutes before I got through. That gave the terrorists enough time to carry all of the sacks into the basement and set the detonators& If I d gotten through to the police immediately& the terrorists would have been arrested right there in their car.
When they arrived at 9:58 p.m. Moscow time, the policemen, commanded by warrant officer Andrei Chernyshov, discovered three fifty-kilogram sugar sacks in the basement of a residential block containing seventy-seven apartments. Chernyshov, who was the first to enter the mined basement, recalled:
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At about ten, we got a warning call from the officer on duty: suspicious individuals had been seen coming out of the basement of house number 14/16 Novosyolov Street. Near the house we were met by a girl who told us about a man who had come out of the basement and driven away in a car with its license plates masked. I left one officer in front of the entrance and went down into the basement with the other. The basement in that house is deep and completely flooded with water. The only dry spot is a tiny little storeroom like a brick shed. We shined the light in, and there were several sugar sacks arranged in a stack. There was a slit in the upper sack, and we could see some kind of electronic device: wires wrapped round with insulating tape, a timer& Of course, it was all a bit of a shock for us. We ran out of the basement, I stayed behind to guard the entrance, while the guys went to evacuate the inhabitants. After about fifteen minutes, reinforcements arrived, and the chief of the UVD turned up. The sacks of explosive were removed by men from the Ministry of Emergencies [MChS] in the presence of representatives of the FSB. Of course, after our bomb technicians had rendered them harmless. No one had any doubt that this was a genuine emergency situation.
One of the sacks had been slit open, and a homemade detonating device had been set inside, consisting of three batteries, an electronic watch, and a homemade detonating charge. The detonator was set for 5.30 a.m. on Thursday morning. The bomb technicians from the police engineering and technology section of the Ryazan Region UVD took just eleven minutes to disarm the bomb, under the leadership of their section head, police Lieutenant Yury Tkachenko, and then immediately, at approximately 11 p.m., they conducted a trial explosion with the mixture. There was no detonation, either because the sample was too small, or because the engineers had taken it from the upper layers of the mixture, while the main concentration of hexogene might be in the bottom of the sack.
Express analysis of the substance in the sacks with the help of a gas analyzer indicated fumes of a hexogene-type explosive substance. It is important at this point to note that there could not have been any mistake. The instruments used were modern and in good condition, and the specialists who carried out the analysis were highly qualified.
The contents of the sacks did not outwardly resemble granulated sugar. All the witnesses, who discovered the suspicious sacks, later confirmed that they contained a yellow substance in the form of granules that resembled small vermicelli, which is exactly what hexogene looks like. On September 23, the press center of the Ministry of the Interior of Russia also announced that analysis of the substance concerned indicated the presence of hexogene vapor, and that an explosive device had been disarmed. In other words, on the night proceeding September 23, local experts had determined that the detonator was live, and the sugar was an explosive mixture. Our initial examination indicated the presence of explosive substances& We believed there was a real danger of explosion,
Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Kabashov, head of the Oktyabrsky Region OVD, later stated.
House number 14/16 on Novosyolov Street was no chance selection on the bombers part. It was a standard house in an unprestigious part of town, inhabited by simple people.
Set up against the front of the house was a twenty-four hour shop selling groceries. The inhabitants of the house would surely not suspect that people unloading goods by the trap door of a twenty-four hour food store might be terrorists. The house stood on the edge of
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Ryazan close to an open area, which was known to local people as the Old Circle, on a low rise. It was built of silicate brick. The sacks of explosives in the basement had been placed beside the building s main support, so if there had been an explosion, the entire building would have collapsed. The next house, built on the soft sandy soil of the slope, could also have been damaged.
So the alarm was raised, and the inhabitants of a house in Ryazan were roused from their beds and evacuated into the street in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time.
This is how the newspaper Trud described the scene: In a matter of minutes, people were forced to abandon their apartments without being allowed to gather their belongings (a fact which thieves later exploited) and gather in front of the dark, empty house.
Women, old men, and children shuffled about in front of the entrance, reluctant to set out into the unknown. Some of them were not wearing outer clothing, or were even barefooted& They hopped from one foot to the other in the freezing wind for several hours, and the invalids who had been brought down in their wheelchairs wept and cursed the entire world.
The house was cordoned off. It was cold. The director of the local cinema, the Oktyabr, took pity on the people and let them into the hall, and she also prepared tea for everyone.
The only people left in the building were several old invalids, who were in no physical condition to leave their apartments, including one old woman who was paralyzed and whose daughter stayed all night with the police cordon expecting an explosion. This is how she recalled the event: Between 10 and 11 p.m., police officers went to the apartments, asking people to get outside as quickly as possible. I ran out just as I was, in my nightshirt, with only my raincoat thrown over it. Outside in the yard, I learned there was a bomb in our house. I d left my mother behind in the flat, and she can t even get out of bed on her own. I dashed over to the policemen in horror: Let me into the house, help me bring my mother out!
They wouldn t let me back in. It was half past two before they started going to each of the flats with its occupants and checking them for signs of anything suspicious. They came to me too. I showed the policeman my sick mother and said I wouldn t go anywhere without her. He calmly wrote something down on his notepad and disappeared.
And I suddenly had this realization that my mother and I were probably the only two people in a house with a bomb in it. I felt quite unbearably afraid& But then suddenly there was a ring at the door. Standing on the doorstep were two senior police officers.
They asked me sternly: Have you decided you want to be buried alive, then, woman? I was so scared my legs were giving way under me, but I stood my ground, I wouldn t go without my mother. And then they suddenly took pity on me: All right then, stay here, your house has already been made safe. It turned out they d removed the detonators from the charge even before they inspected the flats. Then I just dashed straight outside&
All kinds of emergency services and managers turned up at the house. In addition, since analysis had determined the presence of hexogene, the cordon was ordered to expand the exclusion zone, in case there was an explosion. The head of the local UFSB, Major49 General Alexander Sergeiev, congratulated the inhabitants of the building on being granted a second life. Hero of the hour Kartofelnikov was told that he must have been born under a lucky star (a few days later, he was presented with a valuable gift from the municipal authorities for finding the bomb-a Russian-made color television). One of the Russian telegraph agencies informed the world of his fortunate discovery as follows: Terrorist bombing thwarted in Ryazan: sacks containing a mixture of sugar and hexogene found by police in apartment house basement.
First deputy staff officer for civil defense and emergencies in the Ryazan Region, Colonel Yury Karpeiev, has informed an ITAR-TASS correspondent that the substance found in the sacks is undergoing analysis. According to the operations duty officer of the Ministry of Emergencies of the Russian Federation in Moscow, the detonating device discovered was set for 5.30 Moscow time on Thursday morning. Acting head of the UVD of the Ryazan Region, Alexei Savin, told the ITAR-TASS correspondent that the make, color, and number of the car in which the explosive was brought to the scene had been identified. According to Savin, specialists were carrying out a series of tests to determine the composition and explosion hazard posed by the mixture discovered in the sacks&
First deputy mayor of the region, Vladimir Markov, said that the situation in Ryazan is calm. The inhabitants of the building, who were rapidly evacuated from their apartments immediately following the discovery of the suspected explosive, have returned to their apartments. All the neighboring houses have been checked. According to Markov, it is the inhabitants themselves who must be the main support of agencies of law enforcement in their struggle with this evil which has appeared in our country& The more vigilant we are, the more reliable the defense will be.
At five minutes past midnight, the sacks were carried out of the basement and loaded into a fire engine. However, it was four in the morning before a decision was taken on where the explosives should be taken. The OMON, the FSB, and the local military units refused to take in the sacks. In the end, they were taken to the yard of the Central Office for Civil Defense and Emergencies of Ryazan, where they were stacked in a garage, and a guard was placed over them. The rescuers later recalled that they would have used the sugar in their tea, except that the analysis had shown the presence of hexogene.
The sacks lay at the civil defense base for several days, until they were taken away to the MVD s expert center for criminalistic analysis in Moscow. The press office of the UVD of the Ryazan Region actually announced that the sacks had been taken to Moscow on September 23. At 8.30 in the morning, the work of removing the bomb and checking the building was completed, and the residents were allowed to return to their apartments.
On the evening of September 22, 1,200 policemen were put on alert and a so-called Intercept plan was set in motion. Several eyewitnesses were identified, sketches were produced of three suspects, and roadblocks were set up on highways in the region and in nearby localities. The witnesses testimony was quite detailed, and there was some hope that the perpetrators would be apprehended.
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The governor of the region and the municipal authorities allocated additional funds to the counter-terrorist offensive. Members of the armed forces were used to guard apartment blocks, and at night watch was organized among residents in all the buildings, while a further search was carried out of the entire residential district, especially of the apartment houses (by Friday, eighty percent of the houses in the town had been checked.) The city markets were deserted, with traders afraid to bring in their goods and customers afraid to go out shopping. According to the deputy mayor of Ryazan, Anatoly Baranov, Practically no one in the town slept, and not only did the residents of that house spend the night on the street, so did the entire 30,000 population of the suburb of DashkovoPesochnya in which it is located. The panic response in the city grew stronger: there were rumors circulating that Ryazan had been singled out for terrorist attack, because the 137th airborne assault guards regiment which had fought in Dagestan, was stationed there. In addition, the Dyagilev military aerodrome, from which military forces had been airlifted to the Caucasus, was located close to Ryazan. The main road out of Ryazan was jammed solid, because the police were checking all cars leaving the city. However, Operation Intercept failed to produce any results, the car used by the terrorists was not found, and the terrorists themselves were not arrested.
On the morning of September 23, the Russian news agencies broadcast the sensational news that a terrorist bombing had been foiled in Ryazan. From eight in the morning, the television channels started broadcasting details of the failed attempt at mass murder:
Every TV and radio broadcasting company in Russia carried the same story: According to members of the law enforcement agencies of the Ryazan UVD, the white crystalline substance in the sacks is hexogene.
At 1 p.m., the TV news program Vesti on the state s RTR channel carried a live interview with S. Kabashov: So provisional guidelines have been issued for the detention of an automobile matching the features which residents have described. There are no results so far. Vesti announced that bomb specialists from the municipal police have carried out an initial analysis and confirmed the presence of hexogene. The contents of the sacks have now been sent to the FSB laboratory in Moscow for definitive analysis. Meanwhile, in Ryazan the mayor, Pavel Dmitrievich Mamatov, has held an extraordinary meeting with his deputies and given instructions for all basements in the city to be sealed off, and for rented premises to be checked more thoroughly.
And so it turned out that the contents of the sacks were sent for analysis, not only to the MVD laboratory, but to the FSB laboratory, as well.
Mamatov answered questions from journalists: Whatever agencies we might bring in today, it is only possible to implement all the measures for sealing off attics and basements, repairs, installing gratings, and so on in a single week on one condition-if we all combine our efforts. In other words, at 1 p.m. on September 23, all of Ryazan was in a state of siege. They were searching for the terrorists and their car and checking attics and basements. When Vesti went on air again at 5 p.m., it was mostly a repeat of the broadcast at 1 p.m.
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At 7 p.m., Vesti went on air with its normal news coverage: Today, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spoke about the air strikes on the airport at Grozny. So while they were looking for terrorists in Ryazan, Russian planes had been bombarding Grozny.
On April 15, 1997, a funeral service was held for Tskhai at the Cathedral of the Epiphany, and he was buried at the Vagankovskoe Cemetery. After Tskhai s death, the investigation into Lazovsky s group deteriorated into a series of sporadic episodes. At MUR, Lazovsky s case supposedly became the responsibility, by turn, of Pyotr Astafiev, Andrei Potekhin, Igor Travin, V. Budkin, A. Bazanov, G. Boguslavsky, V. Bubnov, and A. Kalinin, and it was also dealt with by the investigator for specially important cases of the Department for the Investigation of Banditry and Murder of the Moscow City Public Prosecutor s Office, Suprunenko, who first interrogated Lazovsky as early as 1996.
When he was released in February 1998, Lazovsky bought himself a luxurious mansion in an elite rural housing estate at Uspenskoe in the Odinovtsovsky district of Podmoskovie (the area round Moscow), which was reached by way of the Rublyovskoe Highway, and then set up a fund for the support of peace in the Caucasus under the title of Unification, in which he took the position of vice-president. Lazovsky continued his collaboration with the secret services. He was kept under observation following his release by Mikhail Fonaryov, an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Moscow district GUVD, but no details are known of his activities during this period.
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Chapter 4
Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev (a biographical note) Whereas during the first Chechen war of 1994-1996, the state security forces had simply been attempting to forestall Russia s development towards a liberal-democratic society, the political goals of the second Chechen war were far more serious: to provoke Russia into war with Chechnya, and to exploit the ensuing commotion to seize power in Russia at the forthcoming presidential elections in 2000. The honor of provoking a war with Chechnya fell to the new director of the FSB, Colonel-General Patrushev.
Patrushev was born in Leningrad on July 11, 1951. In 1974, he graduated from the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute and was assigned to the institute s design office, where he worked as an engineer. Just one year later, in 1975, he was invited to join the KGB, completed the one-year course at the Higher School of the KGB of the USSR, specializing in law, and joined the KGB s Leningrad branch. There, he served as junior operations officer, head of the city agency, deputy head of the regional agency, and head of the service for combating smuggling and corruption of the KGB Department for Leningrad and the Leningrad Region. By 1990 he had risen to the rank of colonel. Until 1991, he was a member of the Communist Party.
In 1990 Patrushev was transferred to Karelia, where he initially served as head of the local counterintelligence department. In 1992, he became the Karelia s Minister of Security. In 1994, when the Leningrader Stepashin became director of the FSK, he called Patrushev to Moscow to serve as head of one of the key divisions in the Lubyanka, the Internal Security Department (USB) of the FSK of the Russian Federation. The USB of the FSK was counterintelligence within counterintelligence, the section which gathered compromising information on the FSK s own personnel. The head of the FSB had always been the FSK/FSB director s most trusted ally, reporting to him directly.
By moving Patrushev to Moscow, Stepashin saved him from the consequences of a serious scandal. In Karelia, Patrushev had gotten into difficulties over the theft and smuggling of precious Karelian birch timber, and the Public Prosecutor s Office of Petrozavodsk had initiated criminal proceedings against him, although he had initially only been a witness in the case. In the course of the investigation, facts had emerged which virtually proved his guilt as an accomplice. It was at this moment that Stepashin transferred Patrushev to a very high position in Moscow, well beyond the reach of the Public Prosecutor s Office of Karelia. Fortunately for Patrushev, the head of the UFSB for the Republic of Karelia, Vasily Ankudinov, who could have told us a great deal about Patrushev and Karelian birch, died at the age of 56 on May 21, 2001.
In June 1995, Mikhail Barsukov replaced Stepashin as head of the FSK. In the summer of 1996, Nikolai Kovalyov replaced Barsukov. Neither Barsukov nor Kovalyov regarded Patrushev as their own man and did nothing to promote him. Then Vladimir Putin, who
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knew Patrushev from Leningrad, became the head of the president s Central Control Department (GKU) and invited his old acquaintance to become his first deputy.
Patrushev moved over to Putin s team.
Patrushev s subsequent rapid professional ascent is linked with Putin s own rise. When Putin became first deputy head of the Kremlin Administration in May 1998, he promoted Patrushev to the vacant position of head of the president s GKU. In October the same year, Patrushev returned to the Lubyanka, initially as Putin s deputy, a post to which he was appointed by Yeltsin in a decree of July 25, 1998, and later as First Deputy Director of the FSB.
On March 29, 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, while leaving him in position as director of the FSB, and on August 9 the same year, Yeltsin appointed Putin Prime Minister of Russia. In summing up the first few months of his administration, Novaya Gazeta wrote: Long, long ago in a highly democratic country an elderly president entrusted the post of chancellor and Prime Minister to a young and energetic successor. Then the Reichstag went up in flames&
Historians have not yet given us an answer to the question of who set fire to it, but history has shown us who benefited. In Russia, however, an elderly Guarantor [of the Constitution] entrusted the post of prime minister to a successor who had yet to be democratically elected. Then apartment blocks were blown up, and a new war began in Chechnya, and this war was glorified by arch-liars.
These events which shook the entire country were also linked with the ascendancy of one other man: on the day Putin became Prime Minister of Russia, Patrushev was given the directorship of the FSB. People with inside knowledge claim that Putin had no choice but to promote Patrushev, because Patrushev was in possession of compromising material about him. On August 17, 1999, Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev was appointed director of the Federal Security Service of Russia. And then it began&
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Chapter 5
The FSB fiasco in Ryazan When someone commits a crime, it s very important to catch them while the trail is still hot.
Nikolai Patrushev-about the events in Ryazan. Itogi, 5 October 1999 In September 1999, monstrous acts of terrorism were perpetrated in Buinaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk.
We shall begin with the terrorist attack which could have been the most terrible of them all, if it had not been foiled. On September 22, something unexpected happened: in Ryazan, FSB operatives were spotted planting sugar sacks containing hexogene in the bedroom community of Dashkovo-Pesochnya.
At 9:15 p.m., Alexei Kartofelnikov, a driver for the Spartak soccer club who lived in the single-entrance twelve-story block built more than twenty years earlier at number 14/16 Novosyolov Street, phoned the Dashkovo-Pesochnya office of the Oktyabrsky Region Department of the Interior (ROVD) in Ryazan and reported that ten minutes earlier, he had seen a white model five or seven Zhiguli automobile with the Moscow license plate T534 VT 77 RUS outside the entrance to his apartment block, where there was a twentyfour hour Night and Day shop on the ground floor. The car had driven into the yard and stopped. A man and a young woman got out, went down into the basement of the building, and after a while came back. Then the car was driven right up against the basement door, and all three of the people in it began carrying some kind of sacks inside.
One of the men had a mustache and the woman was wearing a tracksuit. Then all of them got into the car and drove away.
Note how quickly Kartofelnikov reacted. The police were less prompt in their response.
I spotted the model seven Zhiguli as I was walking home from the garage,
Kartofelnikov recalled, and I noticed the license plate out of professional habit. I saw that the regional number had been masked by a piece of paper with the Ryazan serial number 62 . I ran home to phone the police. I dialed 02 and got this lazy reply: call such-and-such a number. I called it, and it was busy. I had to keep dialing the number for ten minutes before I got through. That gave the terrorists enough time to carry all of the sacks into the basement and set the detonators& If I d gotten through to the police immediately& the terrorists would have been arrested right there in their car.
When they arrived at 9:58 p.m. Moscow time, the policemen, commanded by warrant officer Andrei Chernyshov, discovered three fifty-kilogram sugar sacks in the basement of a residential block containing seventy-seven apartments. Chernyshov, who was the first to enter the mined basement, recalled:
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At about ten, we got a warning call from the officer on duty: suspicious individuals had been seen coming out of the basement of house number 14/16 Novosyolov Street. Near the house we were met by a girl who told us about a man who had come out of the basement and driven away in a car with its license plates masked. I left one officer in front of the entrance and went down into the basement with the other. The basement in that house is deep and completely flooded with water. The only dry spot is a tiny little storeroom like a brick shed. We shined the light in, and there were several sugar sacks arranged in a stack. There was a slit in the upper sack, and we could see some kind of electronic device: wires wrapped round with insulating tape, a timer& Of course, it was all a bit of a shock for us. We ran out of the basement, I stayed behind to guard the entrance, while the guys went to evacuate the inhabitants. After about fifteen minutes, reinforcements arrived, and the chief of the UVD turned up. The sacks of explosive were removed by men from the Ministry of Emergencies [MChS] in the presence of representatives of the FSB. Of course, after our bomb technicians had rendered them harmless. No one had any doubt that this was a genuine emergency situation.
One of the sacks had been slit open, and a homemade detonating device had been set inside, consisting of three batteries, an electronic watch, and a homemade detonating charge. The detonator was set for 5.30 a.m. on Thursday morning. The bomb technicians from the police engineering and technology section of the Ryazan Region UVD took just eleven minutes to disarm the bomb, under the leadership of their section head, police Lieutenant Yury Tkachenko, and then immediately, at approximately 11 p.m., they conducted a trial explosion with the mixture. There was no detonation, either because the sample was too small, or because the engineers had taken it from the upper layers of the mixture, while the main concentration of hexogene might be in the bottom of the sack.
Express analysis of the substance in the sacks with the help of a gas analyzer indicated fumes of a hexogene-type explosive substance. It is important at this point to note that there could not have been any mistake. The instruments used were modern and in good condition, and the specialists who carried out the analysis were highly qualified.
The contents of the sacks did not outwardly resemble granulated sugar. All the witnesses, who discovered the suspicious sacks, later confirmed that they contained a yellow substance in the form of granules that resembled small vermicelli, which is exactly what hexogene looks like. On September 23, the press center of the Ministry of the Interior of Russia also announced that analysis of the substance concerned indicated the presence of hexogene vapor, and that an explosive device had been disarmed. In other words, on the night proceeding September 23, local experts had determined that the detonator was live, and the sugar was an explosive mixture. Our initial examination indicated the presence of explosive substances& We believed there was a real danger of explosion,
Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Kabashov, head of the Oktyabrsky Region OVD, later stated.
House number 14/16 on Novosyolov Street was no chance selection on the bombers part. It was a standard house in an unprestigious part of town, inhabited by simple people.
Set up against the front of the house was a twenty-four hour shop selling groceries. The inhabitants of the house would surely not suspect that people unloading goods by the trap door of a twenty-four hour food store might be terrorists. The house stood on the edge of
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Ryazan close to an open area, which was known to local people as the Old Circle, on a low rise. It was built of silicate brick. The sacks of explosives in the basement had been placed beside the building s main support, so if there had been an explosion, the entire building would have collapsed. The next house, built on the soft sandy soil of the slope, could also have been damaged.
So the alarm was raised, and the inhabitants of a house in Ryazan were roused from their beds and evacuated into the street in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time.
This is how the newspaper Trud described the scene: In a matter of minutes, people were forced to abandon their apartments without being allowed to gather their belongings (a fact which thieves later exploited) and gather in front of the dark, empty house.
Women, old men, and children shuffled about in front of the entrance, reluctant to set out into the unknown. Some of them were not wearing outer clothing, or were even barefooted& They hopped from one foot to the other in the freezing wind for several hours, and the invalids who had been brought down in their wheelchairs wept and cursed the entire world.
The house was cordoned off. It was cold. The director of the local cinema, the Oktyabr, took pity on the people and let them into the hall, and she also prepared tea for everyone.
The only people left in the building were several old invalids, who were in no physical condition to leave their apartments, including one old woman who was paralyzed and whose daughter stayed all night with the police cordon expecting an explosion. This is how she recalled the event: Between 10 and 11 p.m., police officers went to the apartments, asking people to get outside as quickly as possible. I ran out just as I was, in my nightshirt, with only my raincoat thrown over it. Outside in the yard, I learned there was a bomb in our house. I d left my mother behind in the flat, and she can t even get out of bed on her own. I dashed over to the policemen in horror: Let me into the house, help me bring my mother out!
They wouldn t let me back in. It was half past two before they started going to each of the flats with its occupants and checking them for signs of anything suspicious. They came to me too. I showed the policeman my sick mother and said I wouldn t go anywhere without her. He calmly wrote something down on his notepad and disappeared.
And I suddenly had this realization that my mother and I were probably the only two people in a house with a bomb in it. I felt quite unbearably afraid& But then suddenly there was a ring at the door. Standing on the doorstep were two senior police officers.
They asked me sternly: Have you decided you want to be buried alive, then, woman? I was so scared my legs were giving way under me, but I stood my ground, I wouldn t go without my mother. And then they suddenly took pity on me: All right then, stay here, your house has already been made safe. It turned out they d removed the detonators from the charge even before they inspected the flats. Then I just dashed straight outside&
All kinds of emergency services and managers turned up at the house. In addition, since analysis had determined the presence of hexogene, the cordon was ordered to expand the exclusion zone, in case there was an explosion. The head of the local UFSB, Major49 General Alexander Sergeiev, congratulated the inhabitants of the building on being granted a second life. Hero of the hour Kartofelnikov was told that he must have been born under a lucky star (a few days later, he was presented with a valuable gift from the municipal authorities for finding the bomb-a Russian-made color television). One of the Russian telegraph agencies informed the world of his fortunate discovery as follows: Terrorist bombing thwarted in Ryazan: sacks containing a mixture of sugar and hexogene found by police in apartment house basement.
First deputy staff officer for civil defense and emergencies in the Ryazan Region, Colonel Yury Karpeiev, has informed an ITAR-TASS correspondent that the substance found in the sacks is undergoing analysis. According to the operations duty officer of the Ministry of Emergencies of the Russian Federation in Moscow, the detonating device discovered was set for 5.30 Moscow time on Thursday morning. Acting head of the UVD of the Ryazan Region, Alexei Savin, told the ITAR-TASS correspondent that the make, color, and number of the car in which the explosive was brought to the scene had been identified. According to Savin, specialists were carrying out a series of tests to determine the composition and explosion hazard posed by the mixture discovered in the sacks&
First deputy mayor of the region, Vladimir Markov, said that the situation in Ryazan is calm. The inhabitants of the building, who were rapidly evacuated from their apartments immediately following the discovery of the suspected explosive, have returned to their apartments. All the neighboring houses have been checked. According to Markov, it is the inhabitants themselves who must be the main support of agencies of law enforcement in their struggle with this evil which has appeared in our country& The more vigilant we are, the more reliable the defense will be.
At five minutes past midnight, the sacks were carried out of the basement and loaded into a fire engine. However, it was four in the morning before a decision was taken on where the explosives should be taken. The OMON, the FSB, and the local military units refused to take in the sacks. In the end, they were taken to the yard of the Central Office for Civil Defense and Emergencies of Ryazan, where they were stacked in a garage, and a guard was placed over them. The rescuers later recalled that they would have used the sugar in their tea, except that the analysis had shown the presence of hexogene.
The sacks lay at the civil defense base for several days, until they were taken away to the MVD s expert center for criminalistic analysis in Moscow. The press office of the UVD of the Ryazan Region actually announced that the sacks had been taken to Moscow on September 23. At 8.30 in the morning, the work of removing the bomb and checking the building was completed, and the residents were allowed to return to their apartments.
On the evening of September 22, 1,200 policemen were put on alert and a so-called Intercept plan was set in motion. Several eyewitnesses were identified, sketches were produced of three suspects, and roadblocks were set up on highways in the region and in nearby localities. The witnesses testimony was quite detailed, and there was some hope that the perpetrators would be apprehended.
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The governor of the region and the municipal authorities allocated additional funds to the counter-terrorist offensive. Members of the armed forces were used to guard apartment blocks, and at night watch was organized among residents in all the buildings, while a further search was carried out of the entire residential district, especially of the apartment houses (by Friday, eighty percent of the houses in the town had been checked.) The city markets were deserted, with traders afraid to bring in their goods and customers afraid to go out shopping. According to the deputy mayor of Ryazan, Anatoly Baranov, Practically no one in the town slept, and not only did the residents of that house spend the night on the street, so did the entire 30,000 population of the suburb of DashkovoPesochnya in which it is located. The panic response in the city grew stronger: there were rumors circulating that Ryazan had been singled out for terrorist attack, because the 137th airborne assault guards regiment which had fought in Dagestan, was stationed there. In addition, the Dyagilev military aerodrome, from which military forces had been airlifted to the Caucasus, was located close to Ryazan. The main road out of Ryazan was jammed solid, because the police were checking all cars leaving the city. However, Operation Intercept failed to produce any results, the car used by the terrorists was not found, and the terrorists themselves were not arrested.
On the morning of September 23, the Russian news agencies broadcast the sensational news that a terrorist bombing had been foiled in Ryazan. From eight in the morning, the television channels started broadcasting details of the failed attempt at mass murder:
Every TV and radio broadcasting company in Russia carried the same story: According to members of the law enforcement agencies of the Ryazan UVD, the white crystalline substance in the sacks is hexogene.
At 1 p.m., the TV news program Vesti on the state s RTR channel carried a live interview with S. Kabashov: So provisional guidelines have been issued for the detention of an automobile matching the features which residents have described. There are no results so far. Vesti announced that bomb specialists from the municipal police have carried out an initial analysis and confirmed the presence of hexogene. The contents of the sacks have now been sent to the FSB laboratory in Moscow for definitive analysis. Meanwhile, in Ryazan the mayor, Pavel Dmitrievich Mamatov, has held an extraordinary meeting with his deputies and given instructions for all basements in the city to be sealed off, and for rented premises to be checked more thoroughly.
And so it turned out that the contents of the sacks were sent for analysis, not only to the MVD laboratory, but to the FSB laboratory, as well.
Mamatov answered questions from journalists: Whatever agencies we might bring in today, it is only possible to implement all the measures for sealing off attics and basements, repairs, installing gratings, and so on in a single week on one condition-if we all combine our efforts. In other words, at 1 p.m. on September 23, all of Ryazan was in a state of siege. They were searching for the terrorists and their car and checking attics and basements. When Vesti went on air again at 5 p.m., it was mostly a repeat of the broadcast at 1 p.m.
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At 7 p.m., Vesti went on air with its normal news coverage: Today, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spoke about the air strikes on the airport at Grozny. So while they were looking for terrorists in Ryazan, Russian planes had been bombarding Grozny.
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