Questions Linger As Kremlin Reports On ?04 School Siege

MOSCOW, Dec. 22 — A Russian parliamentary commission on Friday issued its final report on the terrorist seizure of a public school in Beslan in 2004. The report briefly highlighted law enforcement mistakes but placed blame for the hundreds of deaths on the terrorists alone.

The reports long-awaited conclusion, read aloud by the commissions chairman during a session of Parliaments upper house, ended more than two years of investigation into the worst terrorist act in post-Soviet Russian history.

It suggested a hardening of the Kremlins position on one of the most painful public episodes of President Vladimir V. Putins administration, brushing aside lingering questions about the events and insisting that the authorities, in spite of many well-documented problems, had done an adequate job.

The Kremlin had pledged that the special commission, stacked with politicians loyal to Mr. Putin and working almost entirely out of public view, would establish the facts and report the truth.

But the delivery of the report did little to satisfy embittered survivors and bereaved families, some of whom labeled it a whitewash meant to shield the Kremlin from responsibility for government negligence and disregard for hostages lives.

More than 1,100 people were taken hostage at the school on the first day of the 2004 academic year in Beslan, a town in southwestern Russia. The terrorists had been sent by Shamil Basayev, the fugitive leader of a group that sought independence for Chechnya, a small Muslim region in the North Caucasus area of Russia. Beslan is also in the North Caucasus, west of Chechnya.

Mr. Basayev was killed in July of this year.

The captors demanded that Russian forces withdraw from Chechen soil, where they have fought two wars against the separatists since 1994. In his remarks in Parliament, the chairman of the special commission, Aleksandr P. Torshin, called some of the terrorists requests non-executable demands.

In the three-day siege, 333 people died, almost all of them after two explosions in the gymnasium where the hostages were held led to a chaotic battle. Mr. Torshin said the terrorists had started the battle by intentionally detonating bombs among the hostages, to the surprise of Russian negotiators and commanders.

It has been established that one of the gang members, acting according to the previously developed plan, actuated a homemade explosive device in the gym, he said.

That statement went beyond previous government accounts, which have typically said the bombs exploded in an unexplained catastrophe, perhaps by accident, as many hostages said immediately after the siege.

The evidence for the new claim was not clear. Mr. Torshin said last year that his commission was waiting for forensic evidence and expert examinations of the blast sites. He made no mention of such evidence on Friday.

Mr. Torshin dismissed as politically motivated the theory, presented in the fall by a dissenting commission member, that the explosions had begun when Russian forces fired rockets into the gymnasium. The evidence for that theory is incomplete and unclear.

Mr. Torshins summary, read from a several-page text, offered the only publicly available insights into the report and the commissions work. Copies of the full report were given to the Kremlin and parliamentary leaders but were not released to the public or the news media, making it nearly impossible to evaluate the evidence on which its conclusions were based.

After giving his speech, Mr. Torshin said the commission had been disbanded, a quiet and unceremonious end to a project once presented as a means to answer the long list of questions about the siege.

Many of those questions remain matters of vigorous dispute, including how many terrorists were involved, whether they had stashed weapons and ammunition in the school before the siege and whether some had escaped or had been captured without acknowledgment by the Russian government.

Questions of the governments management of the crisis have also persisted. Those include questions about the nature and content of negotiations with the terrorists, why firefighters were not prepared to battle the blaze that consumed the gymnasium and why so few ambulances were available to transport the hundreds of injured victims.

Ella Kesayeva, who leads the Voice of Beslan support group, suggested that the report was meant as a signal that Mr. Putin and his circle were no longer interested in having a discussion about the details. We personally didnt expect anything different from Torshin, said Ms. Kesayeva, who lost a teenage son in the siege.

On certain points Mr. Torshins report did not seem to square with witnesses accounts.

He said, for example, that the commission had concluded that tanks from Russias 58th Army had not fired into the school while hostages were in the building, as witnesses and survivors had said. Witnesses and journalists saw two T-72 tanks advance on the school that afternoon, at least one of which fired several times.

In a brief series of points near the end of his speech, Mr. Torshin did criticize the authorities.

The command post, he said, was not properly trained. He said intelligence agencies had not adequately penetrated or gathered timely information about Chechen terrorist groups, which made preventing the attack difficult.

He also criticized the local police, saying they had ignored warnings of imminent attacks and did not have an adequate presence on the roads or near the school that day. And he said some of the terrorists had been arrested and charged with other crimes before the school was seized, but had inexplicably been set free.

Each of those findings, while critical on the surface, were in many ways self-evident and already well known. They offered little new insight into the public understanding of the event.

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