Russia,Chechnya and other issues in the area

Police have found explosives, detonators and a gun in a cinema which was closed for renovations in Russia's second city St Petersburg, the Interior Ministry said.

Interfax news agency quoted a ministry spokesman as saying the stash included 900 grams of plastic explosives, a 200-gram stick of dynamite, two improvised explosive devices, a hunting rifle and 23 rounds.

Interfax news agency said the St Petersburg arrests had been made by organised crime squad detectives, suggesting the find might have been linked to criminal gangs.

The Interior Ministry was not immediately available for comment.

Interfax quoted a ministry source as saying that prior to the discovery, police had arrested three men from Kazakhstan and confiscated four Kalashnikov assault rifles from them.

Chechen rebels, in a swift reply to a Russian bounty offer for their leaders, promised on Thursday to give $20 million to anyone helping them to capture President Vladimir Putin.

On Wednesday the government offered $10 million for information that would help track down the two main Chechen leaders, Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev.

"We offer an award of $20 million to countries, organizations or individuals who give the Chechen republic active help in detaining the war criminal Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin," said a statement on rebel Web sites.

It was signed by "the anti-terrorist center of the Chechen Republic," part of Maskhadov's unrecognized government.

The statement accuses Putin of launching war against Chechnya and of being responsible for the school siege in the town of Beslan last week, when at least 326 people died in a battle as Russian forces moved in to free the 1,000 hostages.

"Putin is blamed for ... many planned actions to discredit the lawful national liberation struggle of the Chechen people against foreign aggression, including the organization of the bloody war against children and adults in Beslan," it said.

Maskhadov, a relative moderate among Chechen separatists who have been fighting Russia for 10 years, has denied involvement in the hostage-taking. Basayev is yet to comment, but experts say the attack showed all the signs of his leadership.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to a parliamentary inquiry into the standoff at the Beslan school that left at least 329 hostages dead.

Putin initially rejected such a public inquiry, saying only an internal investigation would be conducted.

But on Friday, Putin said his government was interested in "receiving a complete, objective picture of the tragic events."

The Kremlin has faced criticism over the government's handling of the three-day siege. Questions have been raised about the capabilities of Russian law enforcement and security agencies.

The upper house of Parliament, known as the Federation Council, would conduct the inquiry. There were no details about the inquiry or when it would take place.

In the siege, more than 1,000 children and adults were taken captive and herded into a gymnasium. The attackers wired the area with bombs.

Russian officials claim that during the standoff, one of the bombs accidentally went off, prompting some of the hostages to flee.

The militants fired on the hostages and Russian special forces stormed the building.

The announcement of the inquiry comes as Russian media reported that some of the captors had been previously arrested but then freed after paying off authorities.

Hostages have also claimed that some of the attackers boasted about being able to bribe their way through checkpoints at the Chechen border into North Ossetia.

Russian security officials identified 10 of the Beslan school hostage-takers Thursday, confirming that six of them came from the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

Concern over Russia's treatment of journalists covering the Beslan siege increased yesterday after a toxicologist revealed that traces of a tranquilliser had been found in a reporter who was arrested on her way to the school.

Nana Lezhava, from Georgia's independent Rustavi-2 TV station, described how she slept for 24 hours after drinking coffee in a holding cell. She had been accused of violating visa rules.

Gela Lezhava, the head of the oversight board at a Georgian drug research institute, told a news conference that urine samples taken from the reporter showed traces of tranquillisers. He said he suspected that the journalist was drugged by the Russian authorities.

The revelation came two days after the renowned Russian investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya claimed she had been drugged while on a flight to Beslan from Moscow.

She said she became drowsy after taking tea on the plane and woke up in hospital, where a nurse told her she had been drugged, but that the records had been destroyed.

International watchdogs said this week that the detention of several journalists travelling to and from the school siege raised new concerns about press freedom in Russia.

President Vladimir Putin yesterday agreed to an investigation by the upper house of the parliament into the Beslan massacre, a concession to allay rising public anger at a lack of scrutiny of the government's mishandling of the tragedy. The upper house, the Federation Council, is considered more subservient to the Kremlin than the lower house.


Mr Putin, who had earlier dismissed the idea of a parliamentary inquiry, said: "Everyone wants a full and objective picture of all the tragic events."

Sergei Mironov, the head of the council, said a commission would be set up at a special session of the council on September 20. It is not clear who will lead it. The council will address further anti-terror laws in the same session.

After a week of unrelenting tragedy, Beslan continued to bury its dead yesterday, as the authorities tried to save their political skins and fears rose that more blood would be spilled.

Clad in black, small groups of residents did what they have done almost continuously since last Sunday; say goodbye to their loved ones and make the grim trek to the town's bleak burial ground.

"We'll be burying our dead for a long time to come," said one man, who said he had lost close family and friends.

"There are still 107 unidentified bodies lying in the morgue. It's been that figure for days now despite the fact that bodies are being taken away by relatives every day."

The authorities were deliberately holding back bodies in giant freezers, he claimed, and only releasing them when other corpses had been recovered so that the figure of 107 remained constant. "They don't want to let on how many people died."

Meanwhile, North Ossetia's septuagenarian president Alexander Dzasokhov was doing his best to save his tarnished political skin. Although he has theoretically fired many of the republic's ministers over the appalling way in which the Beslan school siege was handled, he has repeatedly refused to step down himself.

At least one rally calling for him to stay on has already taken place in Vladikavkaz, the republic's capital, in order to counterbalance an anti-government demonstration, and another is planned. Both events appear to have been artificially orchestrated by his supporters, who are alleged to have press-ganged state employees into attending.

However, it is revelations that at least four of the 32 hostage-takers were from the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia which have really raised fears of fresh bloodshed. North Ossetia, where Beslan is located, and Ingushetia fought a bloody five-day war in 1992 in which up to 800 people were killed. Relations between the two have been strained since.

In the wake of last Friday's slaughter, North Ossetians were quick to blame the Ingush with many mourners vowing that they would have their revenge. Most North Ossetians are Orthodox Christians while the Ingush are Sunni Muslims.

Ingush and Chechen students studying at Vladikavkaz University have already been bussed out "for their own safety" and in the days after the attack, a huge crowd headed for the Prigorodny district of Northern Ossetia where many Ingush live. The authorities managed to stop them before violence erupted but tensions are running high.

The Prigorodny district, which includes the sprawling village of Chermen, is an obvious flashpoint for violence since it was the scene of the first ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union. Ingush fighters tried to seize it from North Ossetia in 1992 and were only repelled after bloody clashes which left hundreds dead. The land used to be part of Ingushetia but was given to North Ossetia by Stalin in 1944 after he decided to exile the entire Ingush and Chechen people to Central Asia on the spurious grounds that they were minded to collaborate with the Nazis.

The Ingush and the Chechens were eventually allowed to return in the 1950s by the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev but when they got back to Prigorodny they found their homes inhabited by North Ossetians. It seems hard to imagine anyone fighting over this flat, desolate piece of territory. The road from Vladikavkaz passes through a bleak industrial wasteland; an enormous zinc factory rots on the left while eerie factories, which have long since ceased to make anything, stagnate under a rain-filled sky.

Armed soldiers waiting for trouble are parked up on the village's outskirts and two heavily fortified check points are positioned at either end. The village seemed quiet enough yesterday. Its Ingush residents insist, however, that they are living in fear of their lives.

Ruslan Chemklikov, a 25-year-old Ingush says it's wrong to point the finger at his people.

"What happened at the school was terrible but the terrorists were not just Ingush, they came from all over. I feel sorry for the innocent children but a proper investigation needs to be carried out before jumping to conclusions."

Thirteen years ago, democracy-hungry Russians yelped with joy as a statue to one of the Soviet Union's most brutal secret policemen was toppled. Yesterday, in a potent symbol of the new Putinised Russia, a new statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of what was later to become the KGB, was erected.

Brushing aside the fact that "Iron Felix" presided over Lenin's Red Terror and had the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands, a monument to him was unveiled yesterday in the town which bears his name - Dzerzhinsky - just outside Moscow. The statue was erected to commemorate what would have been his 127th birthday, and its unveiling was reportedly attended by some 300 schoolchildren and officials.

The toppling of the original Dzerzhinsky statue in August 1991 from its plinth in Lubyanka Square in front of the KGB's headquarters was an epoch-defining moment. The 14-ton bronze statue was so solid that it had to be toppled by a crane, purportedly supplied by the US embassy in Moscow. Thousands cheered as it came down and reformers said it was a sign that Russia wanted to put its bloody past behind it and neuter the Soviet security apparatus Dzerzhinsky helped set up.

That statue has languished in a park near Moscow's main modern art museum among other fallen Soviet idols ever since, but it too may make a return to centre stage. Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's powerful mayor, has said he is minded to re-erect it, arguing that it is aesthetically superb and that Dzerzhinsky did a lot for the country's homeless and railways.

But Dzerzhinsky, a Pole by birth, is better remembered for his ruthlessness, his unswerving brutality and for his many victims. A member of Lenin's inner cabinet, the goatee-bearded leather-jacket-wearing Bolshevik founded the Cheka secret police, the precursor to the KGB, and openly stated that "organised terror" was essential if the revolution was to survive.

In the six years after 1917 when the Communists seized power it is estimated that at least half a million people were executed by Dzerzhinsky's agents, who often claimed their victims in the dead of the night, knocking on their victims' doors. Political opponents, priests, aristocrats and capitalists were all shot - without trial - merely for who they were and what they represented.

Dzerzhinsky also set up the first Soviet labour camps, later to become known as the gulags, on the remote Solovetsky Islands south of the Arctic Circle. In short, he established the system of terror which Stalin inherited, and indeed backed his bid to replace Lenin.

Known among liberals as "the shame of Russia", a new statue to him is unlikely to be well received among those who thought they had seen the last of his likeness in 1991.

Chechen rebel Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for this month's hostage-taking at a Russian school, in which at least 339 died, and for four other terrorist attacks in recent weeks, according to a rebel Web site.

In a statement on Kavkazcenter.com, Basayev blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the tragic end to the hostage-taking in Beslan in the southern republic of North Ossetia.

``A terrible tragedy occurred in the town of Beslan,'' Basayev said. ``The Kremlin vampire destroyed and wounded 1,000 children and adults, after giving the order to storm the school out of imperial ambitions and a desire to hang on to his seat.''

The three-day siege ended on Sept. 3 when Russian troops stormed the school after the hostage-takers fired on children escaping through a hole in a wall caused by the detonation of explosives, the Russian government said.

An unsigned preamble on the Web site said Kavkazcenter.com had received Basayev's statement by e-mail early yesterday and had decided to post it today because of the need ``to shed light on these tragic events.''

Basayev, a former Chechen prime minister now seeking to establish Islamic rule in Chechnya. said his ``Riyadus Salikhin Martyrs' Brigade'' had accomplished ``a row of successful combat operations on the territory of Russia.''

Attacks

He listed these as a bomb-blast at a Moscow bus-stop on Aug. 24, explosions aboard two airliners the same day that killed 89 people, a suicide-bombing outside the Rizhskaya metro station in Moscow on Aug. 31, in which 10 people died and 33 were injured, and Beslan on Sept. 1 ``under the command of Colonel Orstkhoyev.''

The Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, last week offered a reward of 300 million roubles ($10.3 million) for information leading to the arrest of Basayev and former Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, whom it also blames for the Beslan siege. Maskhadov has denied any involvement.

Major-General Ilya Shabalkin, the chief Russian counter- terrorist officer in the North Caucasus region, said the Beslan operation and the other attacks last month were organized by Basayev with Maskhadov's knowledge, Interfax reported.

``We've known for a while that Basayev was behind these terrorist acts,'' Interfax cited Shabalkin as saying. ``We are surprised by the media's excited reaction to the statement about this on the bandits' Web site.''

`Good Guy, Bad Guy'

Even if Maskhadov wasn't directly involved, he ``was aware of the planned terrorist acts,'' Shabalkin told Interfax. ``He and Basayev are on the same council and act according to the well- known principle of a good guy and a bad guy. Maskhadov is the good guy and Basayev the bad guy.''

Basayev called in his statement for an inquiry into the Beslan tragedy by the United Nations and the European Union and ``all those who spoke out with a one-sided judgment of our actions. We are prepared to offer all cooperation for the investigation into this event and give practically any information.'' Putin has so far opposed a public inquiry.

Basayev said the Russian troops' assault in Beslan had been planned from the beginning of the hostage-taking. Putin said at the time that it had not been planned and was provoked by the terrorists shooting at children. Putin said the terrorists were linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

Teachers from the Russian school where a deadly siege took place have counted more than 13-hundred people who were held hostage -- higher than any government tallies to date.
A Russian newspaper reports the teachers worked with a refugee organization. They looked at official class rolls, then tried to remember if the students had come to school the day it was taken over by militants.

An official tally hasn't been given yet. But authorities insisted during the crisis that a little over 350 people were held captive. In a published interview this week, Russian Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said there were more than 11-hundred hostages.

More than 330 people were killed, nearly half of them children.

The head of Russia's FSB security service admitted that plans were made for storming a school full of hostages but were not ready when the standoff erupted in violence, according to a lawmaker.

Addressing a special session of the upper house of the Russian legislature, FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev said the violence was triggered by an accidental blast in the school, Federation Council member Alexei Mitrofanov said.

"We planned an assault, but we were not ready at that exact moment," Mitrofanov quoted Patrushev as saying during the session, called to discuss new Russian security measures and the situation in the north Caucasus.

Patrushev's comments as reported by Mitrofanov marked a departure from remarks by other Russian officials who have so far stated that there were no plans to use violence to end the hostage siege at the school in Beslan.

The bloody culmination of the standoff on September 3 involved exchanges of heavy fire not just between the militants holding the hostages and security forces but also with armed local residents.

The Beslan hostage crisis, the deadliest ever of its kind, resulted in the deaths of at least 339 people, half of them children, as well as the killing of 31 gunmen.

Quizzed by an MP over the authorities' reluctance to release the exact number of hostages taken during the crisis, Patrushev said that that information was not given because it "needed to be confirmed," according to Mitrofanov.

Russian authorities said there were 354 hostages amid reports that there were some 1,200 held in the school.

Patrushev also brushed off criticism over his absence from the scene, saying he, like other Russian officials, "feared terrorist strikes in other regions if they all visited Beslan at the same time."

The Federation Council and the Duma will create a 21-member parliamentary commission to probe the hostage-taking.

Of the 11 chosen from the council, "five have experience of working in the law and order forces and six are civilians," said council president Serguei Mironov.

"In selecting them, we took into consideration the right of these people to access top secret documents," Mironov said, adding that no commission members would have the right to comment publicly during the enquiry.

President Vladimir Putin celebrated his 52nd birthday yesterday basking in the warm afterglow of a Soviet-style cult of personality. Although he and his officials insist they have no desire to engender such a cult, his supporters and the largely state-controlled TV networks have ensured one has grown up.

After more than four years as Russia's President, his approval ratings remain astonishingly high and the evening news is not complete without a long report showing Mr Putin talking to his ministers or inspecting a factory. Yesterday he was thought to have had informal meetings in Moscow with the president and prime minister of Ukraine.

The daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, which enjoys privileged access to the Kremlin, published a sentimental account of his school years in St Petersburg as recounted by his then German teacher Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich. Under the headline "A Hero of Our Time", the paper pictured a smiling Mr Putin being hugged by his former teacher.

The paper told readers Ms Gurevich had just published a book about her famous former pupil entitled Vladimir Putin: Parents, Friends and Teachers. It also carried sentimental anecdotes about how young "Volodya" used to try to copy the work of fellow pupils' work, and how incredibly energetic he was. "During the break, he was so active he was seen on all floors," Ms Gurevich says. Mr Putin, who formerly headed the FSB security service and served as a KGB officer in what was then East Germany, apparently had a few qualms about learning German.

His father had been badly wounded and his grandmother and two uncles killed during the Second World War so Ms Gurevich says that she had a lot of persuading to do.

Other papers dealt with his birthday with more humour. Nezavisimaya Gazeta pointed out that the Mariinsky Theatre in Mr Putin's native St Petersburg opened its season yesterday with a Mikhail Glinka opera called Life for the Tsar, suggesting strongly that it had been arranged in his honour. The opera charts the rise in the 17th century of Mikhail Romanov, later to become Tsar.

Moskovsky Komsomolets was more daring; it published a cartoon of Mr Putin dressed as a king, drinking champagne on a throne surrounded by court jesters and generals. The Putin figure says: "A rightful government is when the sovereign is always right."

Much of the paraphernalia glorifying Mr Putin that was produced after his first election in 2000 has disappeared, though cast-iron busts of him are still on sale in Moscow's kiosks. Tourist firms in St Petersburg now organise special tours of "Putin's Petersburg". The President's fans are shown the apartment block where he and his parents lived, his school, his university, and even the KGB office where he began his career.

Mr Putin and his radical, centralising reforms may raise eyebrows in the West but he is popular among ordinary Russians. Even after the Beslan school massacre, which the authorities were widely perceived to have handled badly, his approval rating stood at 66 per cent.

That may be a far cry from the 80 per cent-plus figures he was polling at the beginning of the year but it is a rating for which many a Western politician would give their eye teeth.

Mr Putin has said he wants elections for regional governors scrapped in favour of appointments (by him) and for the Kremlin to have a much greater say in the appointment of judges. He has also packed his administration with former spies and loyal people from his home city. Opposition parties have accused him of mounting a constitutional coup and worry that he is determined to undo Russia's democratic progress.

But his birthday did not pass without blemish. Andrei Illarionov, one of his most senior advisers, made an unusually scathing critique of the Kremlin's economic policy and savaged the way it had handled the Yukos affair and the trial of the billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Exiled Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev has suffered an arson attack at his home in London, British authorities said on Saturday.

There was minor fire damage but no injuries after Zakayev's home was targeted in the early hours of Friday, they said.

Zakayev's lawyer said the attack appeared to be an assassination attempt on the exiled deputy of Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, whom Russia wants to extradite on terrorism charges.

Zakayev has previously predicted Russian security sources may seek to kill him while in Britain.

The chief of Russia's general staff, Yuri Baluevsky, said in September that Moscow would "carry out all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world".

"If you have threats explicitly made, then an attack just a few weeks after, it doesn't take a detective to work out who the prime suspect is," said Gareth Peirce, Zakayev's lawyer, in London.

But a Moscow official said that was laughable and suggested the incident may have been concocted for publicity purposes.

Britain's Foreign Office confirmed an arson attack had taken place, but gave no details or comment on the circumstances.

UK police said they were keeping an open mind as to the motives for the attack on the controversial Chechen.

Peirce did not say whether Zakayev was at home when the attack occurred.

The Chechen has frequently in the past claimed Moscow agents were out to kill him and other rebels exiled in the West.

Qatar has convicted two Russian agents for a car bomb that killed ex-Chechen rebel leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in February.

"RUSSIA WANTS HIM ALIVE"

But in Moscow, Interfax news agency quoted Russian SVR intelligence service spokesman Boris Labusov as saying it had nothing to do with the incident.

Zakayev has lived in London since being granted asylum last year after Moscow failed in a bid to extradite him.

Moscow lost a case in a British court last year after a judge concluded that evidence it presented against Zakayev was unreliable and probably obtained through torture.

According to Interfax, Russian intelligence service spokesman Labusov stressed Moscow's desire to put Zakayev on trial, "which means that Russia wants him alive and kicking."

Maskhadov and Zakayev describe themselves as Chechen nationalists seeking independence for the province, and say they oppose terrorism and seek a negotiated end to 10 years of war.

But Russia considers any Chechen leader demanding independence, and fighting to achieve it, to be a terrorist and has rejected any suggestion of talking to Maskhadov

Attacks on a Chechen envoy and a critic of the security services may have been faked by the victims, a Russian official suggested Saturday.

Incidents that happened at the houses of Chechen separatist emissary Akhmed Zakayev and former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko could be their own attempts to attract attention to themselves, Boris Labunov, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, the successor to the old KGB told the Interfax news agency.

The media Russian had reported that Molotov cocktails were thrown into Zaiayev's and Litvinenko's houses in the early hours of Friday. Litvinenko was quoted as saying that Russian special services might have had a hand in the incident