“There had been two bombs in Moscow in four days. The first bomb exploded just after midnight at a block of flats at Guryanov Street. It killed 92 Muscovites sleeping in their beds in the early morning of 9th September, 1999. Several bodies were rocketed into the surrounding streets. By daybreak people could see the sad detritus of the atrocity: children’s clothes, a sofa hanging off a ledge in what had been someone’s living room, open to the sky, books, pictures scattered far and wide. Broken glass crackled underfoot in all the surrounding streets. The edge of fear in Moscow was tangible.”
“Four days later the second bomb blew up a similar block of flats at Kashirskoye Highway at five in the morning. The wounded, shocked, painted in dust, as semi-naked as when they went to sleep, a night and a lifetime ago, were carried off in stretchers. The most haunting image was of a man quite blackened by soot from a fire, crawling on his hands and knees through the wreckage: more beast than man. He survived. 130 other residents in the block of flats – men, women, children – did not.”
“Enter the secret policeman. He walked up to the TV cameras and presented to the compound eye of lenses a black and white e-fit picture. The e-fit depicted a Chechen man, with a fleshy face, almost Buddha-like in its plumpness, swarthy skin and tinted spectacles. This was the Chechen terrorist the authorities were blaming for the bomb. He was using the name of Mukhit Laipanov, who had recently rented ground floor space in the two apartment blocks devastated by the bombs. The real Laipanov died in a car crash earlier in 1999. The authorities were very quick to pin the blame on a group of Chechen trained terrorists. It was the Chechens who did it – that was the instant effect of the secret policeman’s e-fit. It was posted up all around the bus stops of Moscow. The Russian authorities have yet to produce a single solid piece of evidence to support their theory that Chechen terrorists blew up Moscow. No-one has been tried, no chain of evidence explained. A few men have been arrested, but none of the alleged ‘ring-leaders’. Three days after the second bomb, the bulldozers moved in, obliterating the sites and also destroying evidence against the bombers.”
“Two more bombs had exploded in cities in southern Russia. The four bombs together killed more than 300 people in less than two weeks.”
“There was a fifth bomb. This one didn’t go off. But the fifth bomb – proved by photographs of its detonator shown above – provides hard evidence that challenges the official ‘Chechen version’ of the Moscow bomb outrages. The fifth bomb points the other way: that the KGB-FSB bombed Moscow deliberately to blacken the name of the Chechens as a pretext for the second Chechen war.”
“The photographs of a detonator, taken by a Russian bomb squad, and other fresh evidence point to a plot carried out by the FSB working to assist their old spymaster, Vladimir Putin, in his rise to control the world’s number two superpower and its nuclear arsenal.”
“When the two Moscow bombs went off, Putin had just been appointed prime minister by President Yeltsin. With no public track record, the former secret policeman was widely mocked as a political nobody, a cold, faceless Kremlin insider who had spent 16 years in the KGB and had emerged as the chief of its successor, the FSB. Boris Kagarlitsky is a seasoned Kremlin watcher in Moscow: ‘You cannot turn a bureaucrat into a glamorous person. He is as grey as he used to be. There is a propaganda machine which works but that is exactly the weakness of Putin, because as a politician he is a nobody. To be a politician you need some kind of past.’”
“No one has ever heard of Putin, except very careful watchers of politics or people from St. Petersberg. He’s announcing “this is my successor, this is a man who can run the country” and there is widespread ridicule. All the newspapers in town including ours said, there’s no way this guy could win an election, unless something really extraordinary is going to happen.’”
“The Moscow bombs were the extraordinary thing.”
“Putin struck out in the immediate aftermath of the bombs: ‘Those that have done this don’t deserve to be called animals. They are worse … they are mad beasts and they should be treated as such.’”
“His poll ratings soared, and he struck again: ‘we will waste them. Even when they are on the bog.’ This was pure gangsterese, but it went down a treat with the Russian public. Putin was working with the grain of Russian racism. For centuries, the Muslim renegades from the savage rocks of the Caucases have been the folk devils of Russia.”
“The Chechens had humiliated the might of Russia in the first Chechen War, which Yeltsin had started in a drunken rage in 1994. They had kidnapped and killed [many] Russian soldiers, sometimes in a bloody and disgusting fashion.”
“Now it was the turn of the old guard, the Russian military and the FSB, to get their own back. And the Chechens were wasted, Grozny mulched to rubble, again, their economy annihilated, their ecology destroyed, their men shot and tortured and dumped in pits – to this day.”
“Putin’s brisk, savage reaction to the Moscow bombs made him a Russian superstar. The Chechens lost everything they had gained from the first war. “
“But the FSB’s official version of the bomb outrages starts to fall apart when you examine the case of the fifth bomb. The story of its discovery, defusal and denial casts huge doubts on the Kremlin’s line.”
“Around 9pm at night on 22 September in the provincial city of Ryazan, 100 miles south east of Moscow, Vladimir Vasiliev, an engineer coming home for the night noticed three strangers acting suspiciously by the basement of his block of flats at 14/16 Novosyolov Street, literally New Settlers Street. Vasiliev said: ‘A white was parked outside the entrance, with the boot towards the entrance. In the car were two men, young men, also young, about 20 or 25 years old.’”
“Vasiliev noticed that the last two digits of the car number plate had been stuck on with paper, showing 62, the Ryazan regional code. Underneath the paper was the true plate number, giving a Moscow code. Vasiliev, puzzled, decided to call the police. ‘As we were waiting for the lift and it was empty, one of the young guys got out of the car and the girl asked: “have you done everything?” “Yes.” “OK, let’s go.” And they got into the car and quite quickly left.’”
“The police arrived. Inspector Andrei Chernyshev from the local police was the first to enter the basement. He said: ‘we had a signal from a man on duty. It was about 10 in the evening. There were some strangers who were seen leaving the basement from the Building 14/16 at Novosyolovo Street. We were met by the girl who stood by the building. She told us about the men who came out from the basement and left with the car with a licence number which was covered with paper. I went down to the basement. This block of flats had a very deep basement which was completely covered with water. We could see sacks of sugar and in them some electronic device, a few wires and a clock. We were shocked. We ran out of the basement and I stayed on watch by the entrance and my officers went to evacuate the people.’”
“Yuri Tkachenko, head of the local bomb squad, went down into the basement. ‘For me it was a live bomb. I was in a combat situation,’ he said. He tested the three sugar sacks in the basement with his MO-2 portable gas analyser, and got a positive reading for Hexogen, the explosive used in the Moscow bombs.”
“The timer of the detonator was set for 5.30am, which would have killed many of the 250 tenants of the 13-storey block of flats.”
“The sacks were taken out of the basement at around 1.30 in the morning and driven away by the FSB. But the secret police left the detonator in the hands of the bomb squad. They photographed it later that day.”
“The local police arrested two men that night, according to Boris Kagarlitsky, a member of the Russian Institute of Comparative Politics. ‘FSB officers were caught red-handed while planting the bomb. They were arrested by the police and they tried to save themselves by showing FSB identity cards.’”
“Then, headquarters of the FSB in Moscow intervened. The two men were quietly let go.”
“The next day, on September 24, the FSB in Moscow announced that there had never been a bomb, only a training exercise. There was no hexogen, only sugar. Pro-Kremlin newspapers reported that the Ryazan bomb squad had made a mistake when they detected hexogen. One newspaper commented that perhaps they hadn’t washed their tester, a remark to which Tkachenko the bomb disposal expert replied: ‘it wasn’t an enema. There are two sources of radiation in the tester. These people don’t know what they are talking about.”
“Alexander Sergeyev, head of the Ryazan regional FSB, said, when asked about the training exercise: ‘the decision wasn’t taken by our local FSB. If it was a training exercise, it was done for everyone to check the combat readiness of all the towns in Russia. Nobody told us it was a training exercise and we didn’t receive a call that it was over. For two days and nights, we didn’t receive any documents or order that it was finished.’”
“The credibility of the FSB version of events hangs on the notion of a training exercise. Why use real hexogen and a real detonator in a dummy bomb? If was just a training exercise, why turn out the residents of the block of flats for a sleepless night? And why should the Ryazan bomb squad be so concerned about a dummy detonator that they took a photograph of it?”
“Putin has declared: ‘there is nobody in the Russian special services capable of committing such a crime against our people. It is immoral even to consider such a possibility. In fact, this is nothing but an element of the information war against Russia.’”
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The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele writes very much the same about Putin’s rise to power and he also mentions that doubts “over a Chechen link to the bombs were heightened by an incident in Ryazan, south-east of Moscow, in September when residents discovered a bomb in their flats and suspicious men who turned out to be FSB agents. The FSB later said the bomb had been put there as part of a training exercise. When Duma MPs called for an inquiry, pro-Putin MPs blocked it.”
Read more: THE FIFTH BOMB: DID PUTIN’S SECRET POLICE BOMB MOSCOW IN A DEADLY BLACK OPERATION? and The Ryazan incident
Related: Blowing up Russia (video)
2021.week22
