2024-03-24 03:34:12
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that the perpetrators of the terrorist attack on the outskirts of Moscow, in which at least 133 people died, were heading for the border with Ukraine, where they had contacts. The speed with which she made these conclusions and turned her attention to Ukraine is reminiscent of similar events almost a quarter of a century ago.
In 1999, the FSB and new president Vladimir Putin blamed Chechen terrorists for the apartment building explosions, leading to the justification for the Russian military’s invasion of Chechnya. At the time, however, it was speculated that it was a prepared provocation intended to unite Russians behind the “warlike” president.
On the evening of September 22, 1999, bus driver Alexey Kartofelnikov was returning home to his apartment at number 14 Novoselova Street in Ryazan, a Russian city of half a million people, about 200 kilometers south of Moscow.
He noticed a car parked in front of the twelve-story building, its license plate partially covered. A man and a woman were taking bags out of his trunk and putting them in the basement of the house while another man was behind the wheel. Kartofelnikov found it strange that the car was parked very close to the entrance. Such parking is not customary in Russia.
When the trio left, he went to the cellar to see what she was carrying into it. He immediately called the police: there were wires sticking out of the bags labeled sugar and what looked like a timer. The police and FSB men arrived in half an hour and confirmed that he was unwell. They found the detonator set for 6:30 in the morning.
According to the first analysis, the thirty kilo bags were not sugar, but the explosive hexogen. The police called on the residents of all fifty-seven apartments to leave. Only with the most necessary things, but above all quickly. Those who had nowhere to go found temporary shelter in the local cinema. Pyrotechnicians were searching the entire house for more explosives.
The hunt began for the trio who put the bags in the cellar. With the help of the statements of several witnesses, the police tracked her down, they even tapped the mobile phone of one of the perpetrators and had an idea of where the suspects were. It seemed that this time the terrorists would not escape − as was the case in previous cases.
The war was about to fall
September 1999 was a month of emotion and horror in Russia. A group of radical Chechen militants led by commander Shamil Basayev invaded neighboring Russian Dagestan from Chechnya on August 7 and annexed several villages to their “emirate”. On August 16, Yeltsin named Putin prime minister, and the same day the Russian military airstrike Basayev’s men.
Another big war in Chechnya was about to happen (the first one ended in 1996 with a ceasefire, the Chechens ruled themselves since then). And that’s when it started. On September 4, 1999, a residential building exploded in Bujnaksk near Chechnya. 64 people died.
Five days later, on the outskirts of Moscow, 400 kilograms of hexane exploded at night in Gurjanov Street. The upper floors of the house collapsed on the lower, more than a hundred people died in the rubble in the morning. Another four days later, again in Moscow, an identical explosion followed in practically the same block of flats. The massacre was even worse: 124 dead.
The invisible enemy
Fear and anger spread through Russia. Families with small children were dying in their sleep, murdered by an invisible, elusive enemy, something the Russians were not used to. They have fought many wars, but never this one. People created patrols that guarded the streets and entrances to houses, checked car drivers and pedestrians.
The mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov, accused the Chechens of the assassinations, as did Prime Minister Putin at the time at an extraordinary meeting of the State Duma (the lower house of parliament) on September 14. But the nightmare continued. On September 16, a truck loaded with explosives exploded in front of a house in Volgodonsk, near Rostov. In total, over 350 people died, more than a thousand were injured.
Vladimir Putin in 1999. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
Putin promised that the killers would be punished – and specifically mentioned Chechen terrorists. That’s when he uttered the famous line: “We’ll catch them anywhere. If we catch them with an excuse in the toilet, we’ll drown them in the toilet bowl.” A hostile mood towards Chechnya rose in the country and a desire to avenge the terror in the cities even at the cost of a new war.
Putin said that this time it will be different and the war will not end with a ceasefire, but with the surrender of the enemy. With his typically grim expression, he heard the call for retaliation. “His calm, hard and steely demeanor was exactly what the Russians wanted to see and hear at that moment,” wrote New York Times Moscow correspondent Peter Baker at the time.
Speech of the Minister of the Interior
But then came September 22 in Ryazan, described in the introduction. Two days after the evacuation of the house in Novoselova Street, Minister of the Interior Vladimir Rushajlo appeared on television. He praised the vigilance of the locals and also the police for the exemplary intervention. He confirmed that there was hexogen in the bags and further bloodshed was averted. The driver Alexey Kartofelnikov was considered a hero and an example that terrorists can be fought when people are attentive and do not only care about themselves.
But the version that Chechen Islamists were behind the series of crimes suddenly got a crack. Not long after Rushayl, Putin’s successor at the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Nikolai Patrushev, appeared before journalists. His statement was shocking: it was not a real terrorist attack, but an FSB exercise.
Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. | Photo: Reuters
The Secret Service was examining how security forces respond to threats. There was no hexogen in the bags, only sugar as written on them. According to Patrushev, Ryazan police experts were mistaken when they claimed that it was an explosive device. Thus, the Federal and Security Service denied the claims of the police.
Patrushev’s words caused a wave of doubt. Didn’t the FSB itself commit the previous attacks to justify the offensive against Chechnya? Was Putin’s decision, or perhaps even Yeltsin’s, to get public opinion on his side? How is it possible that the local authorities of the FSB in Ryazan knew nothing about the exercise, and even the Minister of Internal Affairs did not? Were the secret service agents who planted the bags in Ryazan threatened with capture, and was Patrushev trying to avoid embarrassment in this way?
The role of the FSB has never been proven
It has never been proven that the FSB was behind the terror and death of more than three hundred people. Even some Russians who don’t like Putin consider it too much of a conspiracy theory. One of the versions says that the FSB actually prepared explosives in a basement in Ryazan in order to then expose them and present it as a success in the fight against terrorism. However, she did not count on the accidental witness Kartofelnikov. However, this theory does not explain the previous explosions in Bujnaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk.
No one ever claimed responsibility for the attacks. The official Russian investigation pointed to a terrorist cell led by Achemez Gochiyaev from the Caucasian city of Karachayevsk. But he was never caught. An independent commission led by ex-Soviet dissident Sergei Kovalev wanted to investigate the circumstances of all the September explosions.
But the government and the investigators refused to cooperate with her, and two members of the commission – both members of the State Duma – died in 2003. Sergei Yushenkov was shot by an unknown assailant in front of his house, and Yuri Shchekochikhin succumbed to a never-explained sudden brain swelling.
The attack in Ryazan, whoever was behind it, was the latest attempt in Russia to raze a house to the ground with an explosive device. The Chechen war flared up in full swing, the Russian army conquered Grozny and other areas, but no one tried to kill people in residential buildings in Russia again after Ryazan.
Video: I saw them start shooting
“I saw how they started shooting at everyone,” a witness described the attack in the concert hall in Moscow | Video: Reuters