LONDON — The Russian authorities ignored warnings of an impending terrorist attack and then violated European human rights law when they stormed a school seized by Chechen militants in September 2004, resulting in the deaths of more than 330 hostages, a court ruled on Thursday.
The ruling, by the European Court of Human Rights,
in a case brought by relatives of the victims, amounted to a stinging
critique of how President Vladimir V. Putin’s government had handled the crisis.
The
court found that the authorities had received “sufficiently specific
information of a planned terrorist attack in the area, linked to an
educational institution,” but that they had not done enough to disrupt
the plot, prevent the attackers from traveling on the day of the attack,
protect the school or notify the public of the threat.
The Kremlin immediately rejected the findings.
“It’s impossible for us, a country that has been repeatedly attacked by
terrorists, to agree with such wording,” said the government’s top
spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov.
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The
school siege, in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia, a part of the
North Caucasus region in Russia, began around 9 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2004 —
the first day of school — when about 30 militants stormed School No. 1,
seizing more than 1,100 hostages, including more than 770 children. The
militants were followers of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.
It was one in a string of attacks in Russia in the early years of Mr. Putin’s leadership, including the takeover of a Moscow theater in October 2002, which ended in a bloody assault by special forces that resulted in the deaths of about 170 hostages.
In 2004, Chechen militants struck with frightening ferocity: suicide bombers killed more than 40 people on a crowded subway in Moscow on Feb. 6; assassinated Chechnya’s president on May 9; and blew up two civilian planes after they left Domodedovo Airport in Moscow on Aug. 24, killing 90 people.
The court’s ruling on Thursday offered a powerful account of what quickly became a defining trauma in Russia’s modern history.
“The
militants turned the school into an improvised stronghold and mined the
gymnasium,” the court found. “They executed a number of hostages,
refused to accept any offers aimed at alleviating the hostages’
situation and, starting from 2 September, denied even drinking water to
their victims.”
The
Beslan siege lasted three days. It ended around 1 p.m. on Sept. 3, when
two powerful explosions were set off in the gymnasium, blasting a hole
in the wall through which several hostages tried to escape. Militants
fired on them before exchanging gunfire with the security forces, who
were then ordered to storm the building.
The
militants rounded up the surviving hostages, about 300 people, and
forced them to go to other parts of the school, while dead, wounded and
traumatized hostages stayed in the gymnasium.
Flames spread, and the roof collapsed around 3:30 p.m.
Amid
heavy fighting, more than 330 people were killed — including 12 members
of the security forces — and hundreds of others were wounded. One
militant was captured, and all the others were killed.
The
security forces were armed with tanks, rockets, grenade launchers,
flamethrowers and other weapons. The court found that the use of such
lethal force “contributed to the casualties among the hostages” and
violated the “right to life” by failing to restrict lethal force to that
which was “absolutely necessary.”
The
court also found that the operation’s command structure “suffered from a
lack of formal leadership, resulting in serious flaws in decision
making and coordination with other relevant agencies.”
The
court said that the Russian authorities had fallen short on their
obligation to protect life. “The security arrangement at the school had
not been heightened; the local police had not taken sufficient measures
to reduce the risks; no warning had been given to the school
administration, or to the public attending the ceremony; and no single
sufficiently high-level structure had been responsible for the handling
of the situation,” the court found.
The court ordered Russia to pay 2.955 million euros (about $3.14 million) in damages and €88,000 in legal costs.
In
a statement, the Justice Ministry said it would appeal the ruling.
Russia ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, the treaty that
established the court, in 1998.
A total of 447 Russians filed applications to the court from June 2007
to May 2011. The named plaintiff in the case is Emma Tagayeva, who lost
two sons and her husband in the massacre.
“The
payment will be divided among 406 claimants — some will get €5,000,
others €20,000,” the Tass news agency quoted Aneta Gadieva, a
representative of a committee known as the Mothers of Beslan, as saying.
“These are modest payments to compensate for moral harm.”
The main purpose of the litigation was to identify those who were at fault, not to obtain compensation, she said.
There have been several Russian domestic investigations into the handling of the siege.
In the Russian government’s main inquiry — which is still underway — officials were found to have acted reasonably and lawfully.
In a separate proceeding, the sole surviving hostage taker, Nurpashi Kulayev, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The
authorities brought criminal proceedings against Beslan police
officials on charges of negligence, though they were granted amnesty
from prosecution. Officials in Ingushetia, from which the militants
crossed into North Ossetia, were acquitted in another case of
negligence-related charges. Several of the victims have already received
compensation, some from a humanitarian fund.
The court identified four “serious shortcomings” in Russia’s official investigation of the attack:
•
There was no proper examination of how the victims died, and the
authorities failed to conduct full forensic examinations of the victims
or even to properly record where the bodies were found. For one-third of
the victims, no exact cause of death was ever established.
•
Investigators “failed to properly secure and record other evidence
before the site was irreparably altered by large machinery and the
lifting of the security cordon on the day after the end of the rescue
operation,” making a thorough forensic analysis nearly impossible.
•
The investigation failed to adequately examine the use of lethal force,
did not take inventory of the weapons and ammunition used, and did not
note where and when they were deployed, nor by whom.
•
Investigators and the courts “repeatedly refused to give the applicants
access to some key expert reports concerning the use of lethal force by
the security forces, and the origins of the first explosions in the
gymnasium.”
Yuri
P. Savelyev, who served on a parliamentary commission that investigated
the attack and that presented a separate report criticizing the
government’s handling of the case, said it had never been about money.
“I’m
pleased that the claim filed by the Mothers of Beslan has been upheld,”
he said on Thursday. “I believe this is as it should be.”
The
people of Beslan, he said, “were devastated by both terrorists and the
state, the system, which didn’t take into account their demands that
everything be objectively sorted out.”
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