Home > Officials point finger at al-Qa’ida, but the experts are far from sure
Officials point finger at al-Qa’ida, but the experts are far from sure
by Open-Publishing - Monday 6 September 2004By Francis Elliott
Who were the hostage-takers? What did they want? Who helped them?
The Russian security services have lost little time in providing answers: Chechen rebels and Arab fighters, probably from Yemen and Sudan, demanding independence for Chechnya in an operation part-financed by al-Qa’ida. Security officials say experts have "surmised" from the facial structures of the killed terrorists that nine were Arab and one black.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) is also alleging that the operation was financed by Abu Omar as-Seif, whom they describe as al-Qa’ida’s representative and paymaster in Chechnya.
Experts on the Chechen crisis are suspicious of such claims. They point out that the attack could have been the work of any one of a plethora of radical militant groups in the north Caucasus. Ahmed Zakayev, the London-based spokesman for the Chechen rebels, is claiming that the group may have been from one of the other republics in the region, including North Ossetia itself, but were not Chechens. The pro-rebel Kavkaz Centre website speculates that leaders may have been a homegrown group of Ossetian Islamists.
Further confusion surrounds competing accounts of the hostage-takers’ demands. Initial reports stated that they were calling for the release of fighters captured after an earlier attack in nearby Ingushetia. But by the second day, the Russian authorities said the hostage-takers were not making any clear demands. It was only three days into the siege that it was claimed that the demand was for Chechen independence.
The version being briefed to journalists by the FSB maintains the operation was led by Magomed Yevloyev, a subordinate of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who is reported to have sidelined the former rebel leader, Aslan Maskhadov, as the violence escalates.
There was early evidence that the attacks had created divisions between extremist Islamist groups. A statement on the website of the Islambouli Brigades, which claimed responsibility for last month’s double jet-liner attack, made clear it was not linked to the hostage crisis.
"We in the Islambouli Brigades ... announce that we have no relationship with any of the cells that carried out the Ossetia operation, and that we didn’t contribute with any munitions or money in this operation," it said.
An Arab presence among the attackers would boost Vladimir Putin’s argument that the Russian campaign in Chechnya, where mostly Muslim separatists have been fighting Russian forces in a brutal war for most of the past decade, is part of the war on international terrorism.