Russian
Intelligence Behind Chechen War: Former Agent
MOSCOW,
July 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – A former Russian
intelligence agent, Alexander Litvinenko on Friday, July 26, presented
testimony from Achimez Gochiayev, the chief suspect for the bombings
that swept Russia in 1999, killing some 300 people, and helped to
spark the second Chechen war, as fresh proof that the FSB (former KGB)
secret service was behind the blasts
The
Russian authorities insist that separatist Chechen fighters were behind
the series of devastating apartment block blasts in September 1999 -
two in Moscow, and one each in the southern Russian cities of
Volgodonsk and Buynaksk, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
In
a declaration distributed to journalists, Gochiyaev says that a school
friend he believes to be an FSB agent advised him to rent underground
premises beneath four apartment buildings in Moscow for commercial
purposes.
Two
of these buildings were destroyed in explosions on September 9 and 13,
1999, killing more than 200 people.
After
the second blast on September 13, Gochiyaev says he warned the police
of the risks of further attacks in the other buildings and they
discovered explosives there.
The
FSB claims that Gochiyaev, from the North Caucausus republic of
Karachayevo-Cherkessia, was working for Chechen warlords Shamil
Basayev and Khattab, who have been accused of masterminding the
bombing campaign in Russia.
On
Friday it released photographs showing Gochiyaev next to Basayev.
Litvinenko’s
and Gochiyaev’s charges against the FSB met with some skepticism
from Sergei Kovalev, lawmaker and former Soviet dissident, who heads
the independent team investigating the attacks and who dismissed their
evidence as “insufficient at this stage.”
However,
some experts are already convinced that the conspiracy theory has some
truth to it.
“Litvinenko’s
accusations are not unfounded. Chechen rebels were incapable of
organizing a series of bombings without help from high-ranking Moscow
officials,” former KGB colonel Konstantin Preobrazhensky said.
“Besides,
no extremist group ever claimed responsibility for those terrorist
acts,” he added.
Sergei
Grigoryants of the human rights group Glasnost conceded that the
former FSB officer’s accusations were “weak.”
“But
the authorities have to launch an investigation of this new evidence.
There are many questions which Russian authorities did not answer
after the bombings,” he said.
Russian
authorities used the wave of deadly attacks, which sowed panic among
the population, to justify an “anti-terrorist operation” in
Chechnya ordered by then-prime minister Vladimir Putin and launched on
October 1, 1999.
Putin
was swept to the Russian presidency six months later in the wave of
patriotic fervor that followed the intervention.
“The
FSB accused Khattab and Gochiyaev, but oddly they did not point the
finger at Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov’s regime, which is what
the war was launched against,” independent military expert Pavel
Fengelhauer noted.
The
debate itself is far from new, as the FSB’s involvement was widely
discussed in the media shortly after the bombings and those charges
were later voiced by self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, a former
Kremlin insider who turned into a vocal Putin critic.
The
resurgent debate forced the FSB to once again deny all involvement in
the bombings this week.
“Litvinenko’s
evidence cannot be taken seriously by those who are investigating the
bombings,” an FSB spokesman said.
However,
immediately after Litvinenko’s “revelations,” a member of the
independent investigative team, Mikhail Trepashkin, himself a former
FSB agent specializing in fighting terrorism, was summoned to the
prosecutor general’s office, officially to testify on an unrelated
case.
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