Subversions

At 14.20 on September 3, 2004, a sapper entered the gym of Beslan school No. 1. Yes, not just a simple one, but the head of the corresponding service of the 58th Army. Colonel Bakhtiyar Kara-Ogly Nabiev, head of the engineering troops of military unit 47084, was the only specialist who touched the terrorists’ electrical explosive chain. Then everything burned down in a fire along with the bodies of the hostages. And along with the hope that someday the answer to the main question will be given: why at 13.03 on September 3, 2004 there were two explosions that shook the world.

In two years, this issue has become a powerful political weapon. Now it is an indicator of political orientation. If you are against the “bloody Kremlin regime,” you must believe that the hostages were deliberately killed by “our own people,” and if you are rooting for Vladimir Putin, you must stand like a rock on the official version, no matter how short and full of holes it may be.

Last week, those who believe in the conspiracy of dark forces near the Kremlin received a shepherd - a member of the parliamentary commission investigating the terrorist attack, State Duma deputy from the Rodina faction, Yuri Savelyev. He was the rector of the St. Petersburg Military Mech, and therefore believes that his knowledge is enough for his own investigation (although he was involved in a completely different area of ​​​​military equipment). Newsweek Savelyev said that at first “I was firmly convinced that it was the militants who blew up the hall, that they shot the fleeing hostages in the back, and so on.” Then I read the testimony of the hostages themselves - and saw the light.

More than a year later, Savelyev presented his own (“you may not believe me, but I worked alone”) version of the report on the causes of the tragedy. The denouncers of the Kremlin regime immediately gave the document a political interpretation: the children “were destroyed in order to save the authorities from having to make a painful choice between an official order to start a massacre and surrendering to the mercy of terrorists.” Supporters of Savelyev’s version simply reject the data from official examinations - they say that the government is hiding everything from us, and all its experts are at the same time with it.

Supporters of the official version also now have a “face” - this is the head of the parliamentary commission, deputy chairman of the Federation Council Alexander Torshin. He will publish the main report in mid-September, but Newsweek has already read it. Nothing new: the same official examinations and not a single answer to the main questions.

Savelyev gives the answer: the first explosion occurred as a result of a thermobaric grenade hitting the roof of the building. The shot was fired from the roof of one of the neighboring five-story buildings. But not from the Shmel rocket infantry flamethrower, as the Beslan activists assumed, but from a weapon of lower power - either a TBG-7V grenade fired from an RPG-7 grenade launcher, or an RShG-2 from a corresponding disposable grenade launcher. “Proof” of this is a survey of witnesses: many said that the explosion was somewhere above, a hole up to a meter in diameter appeared in the roof and ceiling, the hall immediately became very hot, and something hot fell and dripped from above. In addition, two witnesses reported that the hall was covered with a cloud of silvery dust; according to Savelyev, these were fine particles of magnesium oxide formed when the grenade fire mixture came into contact with air. Then, according to the deputy, the smoldering of insulation in the attic caused by this explosion led to a fire that “destroyed the wounded hostages.”

The second explosion, which the surviving hostages recall as “the most powerful,” according to Savelyev, also occurred due to “external influence.” Namely, a shot from an RShG-1 grenade. She went through one of the windows of the gym and made a hole one and a half meters in diameter in the opposite wall, exactly under the window sill. And even if the terrorists’ explosive devices exploded, it was during a fire, Savelyev assures.

The deputy claims that the breach in the wall could only have been created by an RShG-type grenade - it first creates a cumulative (penetrating into an obstacle) effect, and then a high-explosive one - already inside and behind the obstacle. If, as the investigation claims, the terrorists' homemade bomb - a "bottle" - had exploded, it would have blown apart the window frame above the window sill, which did not happen, says Savelyev, referring to photographs of Dmitry Belyakov taken before the fire from the very four-story building from which they "shot from a grenade launcher."

In addition, Savelyev claims that the FSB experts made a gross mistake - they incorrectly calculated the area of ​​the breach. For calculations, they used photographs of the hall, and their scale was set according to the size of the window - 3x2 meters. So, the deputy is triumphant, the windows in the hall are 3x3 meters, which means there is a larger gap! And none of the terrorists' explosive devices could make such a hole - they were too weak for that.

The deputy also made other conclusions based on photographs and witness statements. However, the official version is based on the same very unreliable data. The hall burned down, there are few photographs, but there are testimonies for every taste, and the further they go, the more they are adjusted by the hostages themselves to new versions.

For example, Larisa Mamitova said in court that she did not remember where and how the explosion occurred: “I didn’t hear any explosions at all. I raised my head and looked between the rings, there were backpacks hanging there, but they weren’t there. And then I realized that it all exploded.” Now, according to Voice of Beslan activists, she has joined those who are confident in “external influence.” And Yuri Savelyev filed all the testimony that at least somehow testified in favor of this version - from those who heard the “whistle and click” before the explosion, to those who saw unexploded terrorist mines after it - to his report. And the rest he considered “inadequate.”

However, his ideological opponents, led by Torshin, did the same - they carefully studied only the evidence that suited them. And their version is now also supported by supporters from among the hostages - albeit not so numerous.

Although the official commission has its own unbeaten trump card - the testimony of that same Colonel Nabiev. They are available to Newsweek. Nabiyev said on September 6, 2004: when he entered the hall, one local circuit had already been blown up - a “bottle” and an OZM-72 mine. The “loose tape” does not fit his testimony in any way. This could have happened “only as a result of the switch being closed by one of the operators due to his carelessness, injury or death,” the sapper reported.

According to Nabiev, an hour and a half later, the main “operator”, who was outside the hall, tried to undermine the entire system, but the sapper had already neutralized it. Only one device worked, and the special forces decided to leave because the hall was under crossfire. Another device, according to Nabiev, was triggered by a fire, but partially - the plastic bottle melted, and the detonator worked without harm to others. The few living hostages who remained in the hall by that time remember this - “the explosion was like a firecracker.”

But, despite Nabiyev’s official testimony, explosives experts were also divided into two camps. Some simply brush aside the alternative report: well, what can we talk about if Savelyev considers the windows of the hall to be square when they are rectangular? Others say: there is no normal version, so everyone grabs the first not too controversial option.

Those who did the official examinations only frown in disgust. The head of the laboratory of the Forensic Examination Center (CFE) of the Ministry of Justice, Valery Kondratyev, who participated in the preparation of the fire-technical examination, responded simply to Newsweek’s invitation to comment on Savelyev’s report: “My conclusions are consistent with Torshin’s conclusions. And so everything is said in our conclusion.” It says the following: the explosions were inside - the first at the basketball hoop, the second - half a meter from that same window sill. The cause of the fire is unclear.

Kondratyev, as soon as he read the deputy’s report, “immediately wrote a memo addressed to the director of the Center for Social Security.” There, an expert reported that the deputy violated the law. “Part of our examination - 10 or 11 sheets - ended up in Savelyev’s report and were published, which is unacceptable,” Kondratyev is indignant. “This is disclosure of materials from a criminal case, which is prohibited by law.”

Regarding Savelyev’s abilities as an expert, Kondratyev said only one thing: “Well, how could he detect traces of magnesium if he is not a chemist? I couldn’t find it.” When Newsweek asked whether its experts had carried out a chemical analysis of the gym, Kondratiev answered irritably: “No, we were not given such a task.”

But this is in vain, says an explosives technician of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who served in Chechnya for several years: “Because everything is really very similar to the explosions of RShG grenades.” Unlike Savelyev, he is even ready to voice a version of why the shots occurred (Savelyev himself told Newsweek that he also has an opinion on this matter, but will not say it).

The explosives expert of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in contrast to the fierce critics of the Kremlin, believes that the “atrocities of the regime” have nothing to do with it. Probably, an assault was being prepared; it was planned to destroy the terrorists' explosive devices and damage the electrical explosive network with rocket-propelled grenades, which would lead to fewer casualties than in the explosions of the devices themselves. “If I had been given the task of storming anyway, I would have done it somehow,” he says.

What happened next, he cannot even imagine. Something must have gone wrong, the MIA sapper believes, and the shots occurred ahead of time, when the special forces who were supposed to launch the assault were not at their original positions.

It was even easier for Savelyev to describe the events that occurred after the special forces' approach - here the official version is generally vague and undetailed. The deputy proves that after blowing up the gym, the militants took 300–400 hostages into the dining room and surrounding offices and toilets, and then during the assault using grenade launchers, flamethrowers and tanks, 106–110 of them died. He has nothing to object to: the bodies of the hostages were taken out of the school before the prosecutor’s office investigators arrived on the morning of September 4, and then all the rubble was cleared away. The crime scene report, obtained by Newsweek, shows only one body of a hostage outside the gym. So it is absolutely unknown who died in what place of the school and under what circumstances.

However, the people whom Savelyev tried to involve in the investigation, and he himself, are suspected of insincerity and malicious political intent. For example, the same photographer Dmitry Belyakov, whom, in his own words, the deputy “was pestered with questions, like, you have unique evidence, I see a hole in you that I don’t see in any other photographs.” But Belyakov quickly decided that there was nothing to talk about with the deputy: “At first Savelyev said that a certain sniper hit an explosive device or killed a terrorist who controlled the pedal. They start [objecting] to him that, based on ballistics, this is impossible. They argued and argued, and suddenly he changed his mind: well, then a special forces soldier fired a grenade at a mine.” The deputy has a thing in his head, Belyakov believes: “Collecting, raking up [suitable evidence that proves] that the special forces are to blame for everything. They burned everyone, blew them up, etc.”

On September 3, Belyakov was sitting in the apartment of that same four-story building on the top floor along with Alpha snipers. And, of course, he doesn’t believe in any mysterious grenade launchers: “I didn’t see the explosion itself, because I was in the back of the room. I can only say that this was an absolute surprise for [the Alpha snipers] with whom I was in the apartment. When I ran to the window, there was a cloud of dust. Then there was a third explosion, after which the roof collapsed.” “Then these freaks [terrorists] started shooting the fleeing hostages, and I was filming. A woman was shot before my eyes,” the photographer recalls. According to Savelyev, it turns out that the terrorists did not shoot at the hostages.

Savelyev, who constantly repeats that he was engaged only in “technical research,” is indeed no stranger to civic pathos. “What is the cost of the deaths of these 30 terrorists? For each of us we gave 10 lives of innocent hostages! - he is indignant. - The logic of the fight against terrorism in Russia is this: if you commit a terrorist attack, then no matter how many hostages you take, we will still kill you. This is the logic that guided every capture after Budennovsk.”

And, the deputy assures, not everyone was killed. Soon he will publish the end of the report, where he will write “the real number of terrorists who seized the school: from 60 to 70 people.” He made this conclusion by also analyzing the testimony of the hostages: “When not two or five, but dozens of people say the same thing, then this is no longer a lie, but statistics.”

Savelyev was not the first to propose these versions. He had a predecessor in Beslan - Valery Karlov, who conducted his own investigation. His father died at school. It was Karlov who first proposed the “option with RShG”. He still believes in him, but he does not fully share Savelyev’s enthusiasm. “There is a lot of inner desire to make the situation more tragic than it is,” he says, choosing his words carefully.

For example, Karlov does not agree with Savelyev’s conclusions about tanks: “Very contradictory testimony from witnesses. They apparently did not see it themselves, but talked to those who allegedly saw it. I know they doubt themselves.” There were also doubts about grenade launchers - “the explosives guys who came at the end of May said that such grenades cannot cut such a large hole. But I was sure that this was not so.” Now Karlov calls for an experiment - to fire at a brick wall from the right distance and at the right angle.

But, it seems, there will be no additional examination - the official version has become bronzed, like a monument, along with all its “holes”. The investigation shrugs it off: all previous examinations “at the request of the hostages” gave negative results. And they were only indignant - they say that the experimental conditions were not the same. And it seems that there are no experts left who are not suspected of political involvement. No wonder: the Beslan tragedy is becoming increasingly politicized. Hostages to whom new leads are planted are less and less interesting as sources of information. And the truth itself, it seems, is not needed by either the Kremlin’s supporters or its opponents.