Official: Beslan Rescue Flawed (September 1, 2004)

Response To Beslan Massacre Filled With 'Miscalculations'

(CBS/AP) The head of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating last year's Beslan school siege said Wednesday that the operation to free hostages was riddled by "miscalculations and shortcomings," the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.

Alexander Torshin was summing up the results of the probe so far in the upper house of parliament, while victims' families expressed outrage at a prosecutors' report that exonerated the authorities over the deaths of 331 people in the terrifying hostage-taking.

He said that Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and his deputy had sent telegrams less than two weeks before the militants' raid instructing the regional police department in North Ossetia, where Beslan is located, to beef up security on the first day of school.

"These instructions could have prevented the terrorist act or interfered with its being carried out, but they were not followed," he was quoted as saying.

Nearly 16 months have passed since armed Islamic militants seized more than 1,100 pupils, their teachers and parents in the southern Russian town of Beslan, provoking a tense three-day standoff with security forces that ended in a bloodbath.

Torshin criticized authorities' failure to report truthfully on the number of hostages involved, 1,128 instead of the 354 they announced early in the siege, as well as the weak coordination between law enforcement agencies.

"The list of miscalculations and shortcomings could be continued," he told lawmakers, according to RIA-Novosti.

Russian prosecutors found no mistakes in the authorities' handling of the Beslan school siege in southern Russia, the official leading the probe said Tuesday. A total of 331 people died in the tragedy, and relatives of the victims responded in anger at the findings.

Most of the victims — including 186 children — died in explosions and gunfire that ended the three-day drama.

Deputy Prosecutor-General Nikolai Shepel said in comments released by his office that a reconstruction of the events of the September 2004 raid had established that police and other security forces involved in the rescue operation did not bear any blame for the ensuing tragedy.

The prosecutors' conclusions sharply differ from those of an earlier probe by a regional legislative panel that blamed authorities for botching rescue efforts and urged that those responsible be punished.