Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for Americas Schools
The state-controlled Channel One showed fragments of Kulayev's interrogation in which he said his group was led by a Chechnya-born man nicknamed Polkovnik and by the North Ossetia native Vladimir Khodov. According to Kulayev, Polkovnik shot another militant and detonated two female suicide bombers because they objected to capturing children. In May , Kulayev was a defendant in a court in the republic of North Ossetia.
He was charged with murder, terrorism, kidnapping, and other crimes and pleaded guilty on seven of the counts; [] many former hostages denounced the trial as a "smoke screen" and "farce". Family members of the victims of the attacks have accused the security forces of incompetence, and have demanded that authorities be held accountable. Putin personally promised to the Mothers of Beslan group to hold an "objective investigation".
On 26 December , Russian prosecutors investigating the siege on the school declared that authorities had made no mistakes whatsoever. At a press conference with foreign journalists on 6 September , Vladimir Putin rejected the prospect of an open public inquiry, but cautiously agreed with an idea of a parliamentary investigation led by the State Duma, dominated by the pro-Kremlin parties.
In November , the Interfax news agency reported Alexander Torshin, head of the parliamentary commission, as saying that there was evidence of involvement by "a foreign intelligence agency" he declined to say which.
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Their report concluded that the number of gunmen who stormed the school was 32 and laid much of the blame on the North Ossetian police, stating that there was a severe shortcoming in security measures, but also criticizing authorities for under-reporting the number of hostages involved. In another controversial move, the commission claimed that the shoot-out that ended the siege was instigated by the hostage-takers, not security forces.
On 28 August , Duma member Yuri Savelyev, a member of the federal parliamentary inquiry panel, publicized his own report which he said proves that Russian forces deliberately stormed the school using maximum force. According to Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, special forces fired rocket-propelled grenades without warning as a prelude to an armed assault, ignoring apparently ongoing negotiations.
In February , two members of the commission Savelyev and Yuri Ivanov denounced the investigation as a cover-up, and the Kremlin's official version of events as fabricated. They refused to sign off on the Torshin's report. Three local policemen of the Pravoberezhny District ROVD district militsiya unit were the only officials put on trial over the massacre.
They were charged with negligence in failing to stop gunmen seizing the school. In response, a group of dozens of local women rioted and ransacked the courtroom by smashing windows, overturning furniture, and tearing down a Russian flag. Victims' groups said the trial had been a whitewash designed to protect their superiors from blame. In June , a court in Kabardino-Balkaria charged two Malgobeksky District ROVD police officials, Mukhazhir Yevloyev and Akhmed Kotiyev, with negligence, accusing them of failing to prevent the attackers from setting up their training and staging camp in Ingushetia.
The two pleaded innocent, [] and were acquitted in October The verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court of Ingushetia in March The victims said they would appeal the decision to the European Court for Human Rights. The handling of the siege by Vladimir Putin's administration was criticized by a number of observers and grassroots organizations, amongst them Mothers of Beslan and Voice of Beslan.
Critics, including Beslan residents who survived the attack and relatives of the victims, focused on allegations that the storming of the school was ruthless. They cite the use of heavy weapons, such as tanks and Shmel rocket flamethrowers. The provincial government and police were criticised by the locals for having allowed the attack to take place, especially since police roadblocks on the way to Beslan were removed shortly before the attack.
Critics also charged that the authorities did not organize the siege properly, including failing to keep the scene secure from entry by civilians, [78] while the emergency services were not prepared during the 52 hours of the crisis. In addition, there were serious accusations that federal officials had not earnestly tried to negotiate with the hostage-takers including the alleged threat from Moscow to arrest President Dzasokhov if he came to negotiate and deliberately provided incorrect and inconsistent reports of the situation to the media.
The report by Yuri Savelyev, a dissenting parliamentary investigator and one of Russia's leading rocket scientists, placed the responsibility for the final massacre on actions of the Russian forces and the highest-placed officials in the federal government.
A separate public inquiry by the North Ossetian parliament headed by Kesayev concluded on 29 November that both local and federal law enforcement mishandled the situation. The applicants say their rights were violated both during the hostage-taking and the trials that followed.
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In an April judgement that supported the prosecutors, the court deemed that Russia's failure to act on "sufficient" evidence about a likely attack on a North Ossetia school had violated the "right to life" guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. The court stated the error was made worse by the Russian use of "indiscriminate force. The Court's findings were rejected by the Russian Government. In opposition to the coverage on foreign television news channels such as CNN and the BBC , the crisis was not broadcast live by the three major state-owned Russian television networks.
Russian state-controlled television only reported official information about the number of hostages during the course of the crisis. The figure of people was persistently given, initially reported by Lev Dzugayev the press secretary of Dzasokhov [note 10] [] and Valery Andreyev the chief of the republican FSB.
It was later claimed that Dzugayev only disseminated information given to him by "Russian presidential staff who were located in Beslan from September 1". The deliberately false figure had grave consequences for the treatment of the hostages by their angered captors the hostage-takers were reported saying, "Maybe we should kill enough of you to get down to that number" and contributed to the declaration of a "hunger strike". On 8 September , several leading Russian and international human rights organizations — including Amnesty International , Human Rights Watch , Memorial , and Moscow Helsinki Group — issued a joint statement in which they pointed out the responsibility that Russian authorities bore in disseminating false information:.
We call on Russian authorities to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the circumstances of the Beslan events which should include an examination of how authorities informed the whole society and the families of the hostages. We call on making the results of such an investigation public. The Moscow daily tabloid Moskovskij Komsomolets ran a rubric headlined "Chronicle of Lies", detailing various initial reports put out by government officials about the hostage taking, which later turned out to be false.
The late Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya , who had negotiated during the Moscow siege, was twice prevented by the authorities from boarding a flight. When she eventually succeeded, she fell into a coma after being poisoned aboard an aeroplane bound to Rostov-on-Don. The crew of Rustavi 2 was arrested; the Georgian Minister of Health said that the correspondent Nana Lezhava, who had been kept for five days in the Russian pre-trial detention centers, had been poisoned with dangerous psychotropic drugs like Politkovskaya, Lezhava had passed out after being given a cup of tea.
Raf Shakirov, chief editor of the Russia's leading newspaper, Izvestia , was forced to resign after criticism by the major shareholders of both style and content of the issue of 4 September It also expressed doubts about the government's version of events. The video tape made by the hostage-takers and given to Ruslan Aushev on the second day was declared by the officials as being "blank". A fragment of tape shot by the hostage-takers was shown on Russian NTV television several days after the crisis.
Another fragment of a tape shot by the hostage-takers was acquired by media and publicised in January In July , the Mothers of Beslan asked the FSB to declassify video and audio archives on Beslan, saying there should be no secrets in the investigation. Footage shows a large hole in the wall of the sports hall, with a man saying, "The hole in the wall is not from this [kind of] explosion.
Apparently someone fired [there]," adding that many victims bear no sign of shrapnel wounds. In another scene filmed next morning, a uniformed investigator points out that most of the IEDs in the school actually did not go off, and then points out a hole in the floor which he calls a "puncture of an explosive character". Several hostage-takers, including one of the leaders, Vladimir Khodov , had been previously involved in terrorist activities, but released from government custody prior to the attack despite their high profiles.
He said that the previously arrested terrorists only would have been freed if they were of use to the FSB, and that even in the case that they were freed without being turned into FSB assets, they would be under a strict surveillance regime that would not have allowed them to carry out the Beslan attack unnoticed.
He said he believed the death threat was linked to a decision by the group he represented to name senior officials involved in the chaotic rescue operation whom they want put on trial. In general, the criticism was rejected by the Russian government. President Vladimir Putin specifically dismissed the foreign criticism as Cold War mentality and said that the West wants to "pull the strings so that Russia won't raise its head. The Russian government defended the use of tanks and other heavy weaponry, arguing that it was used only after surviving hostages escaped from the school.
However, this contradicts the eyewitness accounts, including by the reporters and former hostages. Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia Nikolai Shepel, acting as deputy prosecutor at the trial of Kulayev, found no fault with the security forces in handling the siege, "According to the conclusions of the investigation, the expert commission did not find any violations that could be responsible for the harmful consequences. To address doubts, Putin launched a Duma parliamentary investigation led by Alexander Torshin, [] resulting in the report which criticised the federal government only indirectly [] and instead put blame for "a whole number of blunders and shortcomings" on local authorities.
In , previously unreleased documents by the national commission in Moscow were made available to Der Spiegel. According to the paper, "instead of calling for self-criticism in the wake of the disaster, the commission recommended the Russian government to crack down harder. Three local top officials resigned the aftermath of the tragedy: Five Ossetian and Ingush police officers were tried in the local courts; all of them were subsequently amnestied or acquitted in As of December , none of the Russian federal officials suffered consequences in connection with the Beslan events.
Nur-Pashi Kulayev claimed that attacking a school and targeting mothers and young children was not merely coincidental, but was deliberately designed for maximum outrage with the purpose of igniting a wider war in the Caucasus. According to Kulayev, the attackers hoped that the mostly Orthodox Ossetians would attack their mostly Muslim Ingush and Chechen neighbours to seek revenge, encouraging ethnic and religious hatred and strife throughout the North Caucasus. The expected backlash against neighbouring nations failed to materialise on a massive scale. In one noted incident, a group of ethnic Ossetian soldiers led by a Russian officer detained two Chechen Spetsnaz soldiers and executed one of them.
In September , the self-proclaimed faith healer and miracle-maker Grigory Grabovoy promised he could resurrect the murdered children. Grabovoy was arrested and indicted of fraud in April , amidst the accusations that he was being used by the government as a tool to discredit the Mothers of Beslan.
In January , the Voice of Beslan group, which in the previous year had been court-ordered to disband, was charged by Russian prosecutors with "extremism" for their appeals in to the European Parliament to help establish an international investigation. As of February , the group was charged in total of four different criminal cases. Russian Patriarch Alexius II 's plans to build an Orthodox church as part of the Beslan monument have caused a serious conflict between the Orthodox Church and the leadership of the Russian Muslims in The attack at Beslan was met with international abhorrence and universal condemnation.
Countries and charities around the world donated to funds set up to assist the families and children that were involved in the Beslan crisis. On 1 September , UNICEF marked the first anniversary of the Beslan school tragedy by calling on all adults to shield children from war and conflict.
Maria Sharapova and many other female Russian tennis players wore black ribbons during the US Open in memory of the tragedy. In August , two new schools were built in Beslan, paid for by the Moscow government. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Russian hostage crisis and massacre. Bold italics indicate incidents resulting in more than 50 deaths. Incidents are bombings, unless described otherwise.
Kaspiysk Moscow theater crisis Grozny. Znamenskoye Tushino Stavropol Red Square. Grozny stadium bombing Moscow Aug. Aircraft bombings Beslan school siege. Grozny bombing Grozny clashes. Metrojet Flight on its way to Russia. Timeline of the Beslan school siege. Russian government censorship of Chechnya coverage.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. International response to the Beslan school siege. Russia portal Terrorism portal s portal. Archived from the original on 17 October Retrieved 9 January What Putin's government is covering up. Retrieved 28 July Of those who died, were children. John and the Day of Knowledge". Archived from the original on 3 October Retrieved 27 March Archived from the original on 21 July Archived from the original on 19 May Archived from the original on 11 November Retrieved 29 July Retrieved 14 February Retrieved 13 August Archived from the original on 25 September Archived from the original on 18 October Archived from the original on 16 October Retrieved 3 March Petersburg Times , 19 April Novaya Gazeta in Russian.
Archived from the original on 29 September Retrieved 11 April Where were the Arabs from? Where were the blacks from? And this number — hostages Hoffman, David 4 September Retrieved 20 April Archived from the original on 15 July Archived from the original on 28 September Archived from the original on 29 October Archived from the original on 16 December Archived 3 January at the Wayback Machine.
The New York Times. Petersburg Times , 9 December Retrieved 2 July Archived from the original on 30 September The Sydney Morning Herald. Access to information and journalists' working conditions" PDF. Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Archived from the original on 21 March Archived from the original on 14 November Retrieved 26 April Retrieved on January 30, Archived from the original DOC on 25 June Retrieved 6 December Archived from the original on 20 October Retrieved 16 September Archived from the original on 6 January Western governments soft on terror".
American Foreign Policy Council. Archived from the original on 19 November Archived from the original on 13 May Russian and Eurasian Security Network. Archived from the original on 11 March Archived from the original on 18 June Nezavisimaya Gazeta , cited by kremlin. Retrieved 20 February Interfax , cited by NEWSru.
Retrieved 31 July Petersburg Times , 29 December South China Morning Post.
Archived from the original on 5 May Archived from the original PDF on 18 March Retrieved 1 November Putin is culpable , Christian Science Monitor , 29 August The blame Archived 2 January at the Wayback Machine. Archived from the original on 18 July Moskovskiye Novosti N39 in Russian. Retrieved 11 September Archived from the original on 1 January International Foundation for Terror Act Victims. Retrieved 23 May Archived from the original on 7 July Retrieved 6 July Retrieved 7 November Timeline International response Russian government censorship.
Yacine Benalia was described as a perpetrator in initial accounts but he is not named in the Torshin Report. Retrieved from " https: Webarchive template wayback links CS1 Russian-language sources ru All articles with dead external links Articles with dead external links from April CS1 uses Russian-language script ru Articles with dead external links from August Articles with permanently dead external links Articles with Russian-language external links Webarchive template webcite links Articles with short description Use dmy dates from November Coordinates on Wikidata Wikipedia articles needing clarification from April All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from January Wikipedia articles needing clarification from May Articles to be expanded from April All articles to be expanded Articles using small message boxes Commons category link is on Wikidata Articles containing Russian-language text Find a Grave template with ID not in Wikidata Articles with French-language external links.
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Beslan school siege
Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Terror at Beslan by John Giduck. The complete and accurate story of the Beslan School Siege that occurred in Russia on September 1, This book tells the untold story about the victims, the soldiers who were there and the history of the events leading up to the tragic incident.
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But more than just the story, this book highlights the lessons America's school system can learn from the tragedy to protect The complete and accurate story of the Beslan School Siege that occurred in Russia on September 1, But more than just the story, this book highlights the lessons America's school system can learn from the tragedy to protect itself from terrorism. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
To ask other readers questions about Terror at Beslan , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Jul 26, Brandon rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Why don't we address school violence with the same vigor and rationale as we do school fires in the U. This book is a serious "lessons learned" and I fear for the day that a true terrorist attack happens in an American school. I don't doubt for one second that it won't happen, it's an easy, soft target that will terrify and mortify millions as they watch innocent kids die on the 6 o'clock news.
I pray it never happens, but I expect it will unless the advice provided in this book is heeded. Mar 03, Randy Vest is currently reading it. I just got the book less than one week ago at a lecture by David Grossman. I then attended a lecture by the author John Giduck.
I am a police officer and a retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant and I know, deep down, that this, unfortunately, will happen in the United States. I am preparing for this inevitably as should everyone! Nov 29, Ryan rated it it was amazing. A book all Americans should read. Dec 20, Scottnshana rated it liked it. Good news and bad news The bad news is that about four-fifths of the way in, the book deviates from a darn good tactical analysis of this horrible event to devote almost 50 pages to a history of Islamic anger from Mohammed to today.
Those who have already read up on Chechen terror, who saw the movie "Munich," or who watched Americans hurling themselves from the World Trade Center are already convinced that there are some very nasty people in the Islamic world, usually years old, bored, Good news and bad news Those who have already read up on Chechen terror, who saw the movie "Munich," or who watched Americans hurling themselves from the World Trade Center are already convinced that there are some very nasty people in the Islamic world, usually years old, bored, and obsessed with the idea of causing horrendous mayhem in the civilizations they've deemed "infidel".
The book's de facto audience--military and law enforcement--should already get it. The good news is that recent events in American schools provide Mr. Giduck a fine opportunity for a second edition without this superfluous chapter Sixteen , and the addition of a good hard look at whether his prescriptions and they are good ones are applicable to case studies at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, or the Anders Breivik shooting spree in Norway. There is no doubt that murderous personalities are increasingly providing a clear and present danger to schoolkids; the problem is that increasingly they aren't infiltrating across the Canadian or Mexican borders, but disgruntled and disenfranchised folks in our midst attacking Gabbie Giffords, the Murrah Federal Building, or the Deployment Center at Fort Hood.
I like the author's push for more civil involvement in preventing these events. I like his well-researched analyses of both Beslan and the Nord-Ost Theater takeover. In fact, I wholeheartedly agree with most of his advice for American law enforcement and educators regarding these horrific events maybe not the security guards roaming the halls daily with silenced pistols. His discussion of explosives, communications, chains of command, planning, and rehearsals are outstanding. Seven years on, though, events have overtaken this analysis, and the United States is neither Russia nor Israel.
Our public servants still constrained to walk the tightrope between an oath to uphold the Bill of Rights and putting these truly despicable perps out of action deserve a second edition of "Terror at Beslan", edited to match up the book's prescient and excellent observations with an acknowledgement that in the West there are also home-grown Nidal Hassan was born in Virginia, so even he fits the trend whackos perpetrating these events and they deserve just as much attention as the terrorists he analyzes in Chapter Sixteen.
Jul 19, Zach Majors rated it it was amazing. This will wake you up to what to expect in America, if we don't change the way we do things. There are bad guys out there, and we treat them as friends. Aug 13, Tara Wowra rated it liked it. My son, a police officer, recommended this book to me. How badly can the Russians screw an operation up? This book will tell you.
May 22, Bob Patridge rated it it was amazing. Have a school-aged child? This should be required reading. Dec 04, Tom Schulte rated it liked it. This book is in roughly three parts. First, there is fifty-ish pages of introductory material mostly stating that this book is going to be a wake-up call for America before Islamist terrorists - maybe even Chechens themselves - enact a similar tragedy on American soil.
The middle part is a taught, blow-by-blow account of the takeover and take-down for which the author is prepared from his career in anti-terrorist training. Ex-soldier Giduck is part of Archangel, a U. He also went on site to review the school before it was demolished. From his interviews with Russian military responders to the Beslan school siege, including the elite Alpha and Vympel units of the Russian Federal Security Service FSB , he garners many stunning details I had not heard before. This includes a surrounding angry and drunken mob complicating matters and rabid, sadistic perpetrators - apparently some deluded mercenaries - that, among other things, forced mothers to choose staying with all their children or leaving with one infant.
There is also the moving case of the 7-year-old Aida blown from the gym holding area by premature explosions wire to destroy the school who out of confusion and fear crawled back into the terrorists' control. Giduck's final part is a clarion call to get your head in the game, watch out for Chechens crossing the border and count the days until this happens to a U.
Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America's Schools
Hopefully his prediction will continue to not bear out. I wonder how he feels knowing perhaps the closest his prediction has come true is due to mentally unstable Americans citizens and residents with access to guns: Another interesting dimension to this book is the differences in Russian special forces approaches to such incidents. They are very keen on incapacitating gases, quick application of overwhelming firepower, and explosively blowing holes in walls to gain entrance. Dec 22, Amy Christensen rated it it was amazing Shelves: The author John Giduck holds more than one advanced degrees; one of which is a Masters in International Affairs with a specialization in Russian Affairs.
He has traveled extensively throughout Russia and he has over 10 years of training experience with Russian Military's elite Special Forces. He has trained all levels of American Law Enforcement units and has served as a consultant for Foreign affairs, terrorism and organized crime. He is currently working with the Archangel Group, an agency whi The author John Giduck holds more than one advanced degrees; one of which is a Masters in International Affairs with a specialization in Russian Affairs. He is currently working with the Archangel Group, an agency which provides consulting and training to U.
Law Enforcement, Military and other Government branches on these topics. Terror at Beslan is an accounting of the horrific terrorist siege in the small town of Beslan within the country of Russia in It is clear that Mr. Giduck believes that this siege should be analyzed in detail as it is, without a doubt, a future America will have to face. Terrorism has already reached American soil in epic proportions and with only one moment in thousands of years of Islamic Extremism and violence; the terrorists are far from finished. Giduck does not mince words, terrorists are described for what they are, terrorists.
They are not freedom fighters or insurgents. A terrorist is someone who has been bred from birth to kill and they revel and celebrate in human suffering. While certainly most valuable from law enforcement and homeland security standpoint, this book is not beyond the scope of a typical American. Giduck actually has much praise to offer America's Soccer Mom as an important branch of security for our nation's most precious commodity: Vigilance, documentation and reporting so common in the Soccer Mom culture, may well have prevented the siege at Beslan.
Events of that size do not just happen; it takes months of suspicious surveillance. The key that Mr. Giduck stresses is to be prepared and not to be lulled into passivity that something so awful could not happen here on American soil, for we know that it already has.
Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America's Schools by John Giduck
Sep 18, Cameron rated it it was amazing Shelves: This book has some valuable lessons for all emergency services workers, especially the importance of training together and developing response plans with each other and important stake holders - like school administrators. I think Americans might be tempted to dismiss the events in Beslan as the product of a radically different culture and government, but to think a similar incident and similar mistakes couldn't happen in the USA would be quite foolish.
Readers should be aware that there are quit This book has some valuable lessons for all emergency services workers, especially the importance of training together and developing response plans with each other and important stake holders - like school administrators. Readers should be aware that there are quite a few scenes described in the book that are terribly graphic.
The terrorists commited every sort of the worst kind of crimes against their hostages while they held them. It is not easy to read. Giduck does make a few errors in the book that I feel may have damaged his works credibility. He predicted a similar event in the US within iirc 10 years - it didn't happen. He describes the actions and heroism of the Spetznaz in a manner that reveals that he practically worships their martyrdom.
I have no doubt of their heroism, but I tend to question anything described in black and white terms. Giduck also makes the ludicrous suggestion that American schools could have gas distribution systems installed for the administration of "knock out gas" in the case of a hostage incident.
Still, I think the lessons available in this book far outweigh the few ill-advised statements that the author made. Jul 07, Kelly Owen rated it it was ok. This book came highly recommended. However it is poorly written.