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http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,662476,00.html
Former ally links Putin to Moscow blasts
Jonathan Steele and Ian Traynor in Moscow
Wednesday March 6, 2002
The Guardian
The Russian former media mogul Boris Berezovsky launched his strongest
attack yesterday on his one-time friend and now president, Vladimir
Putin, accusing him of being linked to the terrorist bombings of
apartment buildings that killed about 300 Russians in September 1999.
Mr Berezovsky, now living in London, called a press conference to
produce a British explosives expert, a French documentary-maker, a
former Russian agent of the FSB (successor to the KGB), and a woman who
lost her mother in the blasts, to accuse the security service and
demand an official inquiry. "I am sure the bombings were organised by
the FSB. It's not just speculation. It's a clear conclusion", Mr
Berezovsky said yesterday. "I'm not saying Mr Putin gave an order to
blow up those buildings. I'm saying that at the least he knew the FSB
was involved."
Mr Putin, who was named prime minister shortly before the bombings
after heading the FSB, blamed the attacks on Chechens and used public
outrage to justify sending Russian forces into the rebel republic.
Presenting himself as a tough war leader, he won the presidential
election in 2000. Mr Berezovsky, who has lost his share in several
Russian TV companies since 2000, based his case on the professional
nature of the bombings and the large amount of explosives used. He also
cited official discrepancies after a foiled blast at a block of flats
in Ryazan.
A resident alerted the police after seeing three suspicious people
unloading bags into a basement a few days after the first explosion in
Moscow. The next day the interior minister said the police had defused
a timing device after finding explosives in the bags. But when the new
FSB chief said the bags contained sugar and had been planted as a drill
to test police vigilance, the hunt for suspects was called off.
Mr Berezovsky was close to Boris Yeltsin, who was president at the
time, and used his TV stations to run a campaign in favour of Mr Putin.
Opponents claim his attack on Mr Putin is a personal vendetta after he
lost influence. "I didn't raise the matter until recently," he
admitted yesterday. "I didn't expect the security services could take
part in such a crime." In a bid to pre-empt the allegations, a Moscow
official said yesterday that Mr Berezovsky was being investigated for
links to Chechen rebels and could be implicated in the murder of a
senior Russian police officer in Chechnya. Moscow may demand he be
extradited from Britain or request an international arrest warrant for
him, Pavel Barkovsky of the prosecutor-general's office told the
Interfax news agency. "Berezovsky is trying to present himself as a
political fighter and to seek attention by staging acts of political
provocation," he added. New evidence indicated that Mr Berezovsky had
supplied around $1m (£700,000) to Chechen rebel warlords to buy
weaponry, he claimed. Officials say they know who carried out the
bombings and maintain they were "Chechen terrorists", but the only two
suspects to come to court are non-Chechens. They were acquitted last
year. The Russians have already issued a national arrest warrant for
Mr Berezovsky in connection with allegations of embezzlement from
Aeroflot.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1857000/
1857060.stm
Wednesday, 6 March, 2002, 00:23 GMT
Russian tycoon blames Moscow for blasts
Exiled Russian media tycoon Boris Berezovsky says he believes Moscow
orchestrated the 1999 bombings of apartment blocks in Russian cities
which triggered Russia's onslaught in Chechnya.
At a news conference in London, Mr Berezovsky presented what he said
was evidence that the bombings were the work of the Russian security
service, the FSB.
He also said he was sure that President Vladimir Putin, who was prime
minister at the time, knew about the campaign.
A spokesman for the FSB in Russia told the Interfax news agency that
the allegations were "groundless and lacking in common sense".
The blasts, which killed about
300 people, were blamed on Chechen rebels and shortly afterwards Mr
Putin launched a second war against Chechnya.
The military operation had massive support from a public outraged by
the bombings.
Documentary evidence
But Mr Berezovsky said intelligence agents, investigative journalists
and explosives experts had convinced him that the FSB was to blame.
The Russian tycoon showed part of a French documentary at the news
conference which linked two bombings in Moscow and one in Volgadonsk
with an attempted attack in Ryazan, 200 km (125 miles) south-east of
Moscow.
Security authorities said the Ryazan incident was an "exercise" but Mr
Berezovsky and his team showed date- and time-stamped pictures which
they said proved that the detonator found at Ryazan was real and said
local police experts said traces of explosives were found.
He also has the backing of a Russian explosives expert, ex-FSB member
and former director of the Russian Conversion Explosives Centre, Nikita
Chekulin, who says that before the bombings, security services
purchased large amounts of the explosive Hexogen, said to have been
found at Ryazan.
Mr Berezovsky says the fact that no-one has ever been brought to
justice for the bombings is further proof that they were not the result
of Chechens.
Putin `compliant'
The tycoon said that the subsequent campaign in Chechnya aided Mr
Putin's rise to power.
"The FSB thought that Putin would not be able to come to power through
lawful democratic means," he said. "I am not saying that Putin ordered
the attacks.. but what I am saying is that he knew such things were
taking place."
Mr Berezovsky was actually a key aide in helping Mr Putin to victory in
the 2000 elections but he has since fallen out of favour with the
Kremlin and now lives in self-imposed exile in Europe.
He called on President Putin to order an inquiry into the bombings.
"Ever since Putin came to power, people have been asking: Is he really
a democratic president of Russia or simply an old-style dictator
putting on a show for the West?...
Why does he continue to block investigations into the deadliest
terrorist attacks in our history?", he said.
"I am calling for an open and independent investigation."
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Russia-
Berezovsky.html
March 6, 2002
Probe Sought for Apartment Bombings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:16 a.m. ET
LONDON (AP) -- Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky said Tuesday he would
ask Europe's human rights guardian to investigate allegations that
Russia's secret service carried out a series of deadly apartment
bombings.
Berezovsky, a former Kremlin insider who fell out of favor after
President Vladimir Putin's election, called the 1999 attacks that
killed more than 300 people unprecedented
"Two and a half years later, no one can say the people who did it are
in jail, nor can we really say who did it," he said.
The explosions in Moscow and the city of Volgodonsk in 1999 blew up
several apartment buildings, killing scores of sleeping residents.
Moscow blamed the attacks on Chechen rebels, and several months later
sent troops back into Chechnya after a three-year absence.
On Tuesday, Berezovsky accused Russia's Federal Security Service, or
FSB, of orchestrating the bombings. At a news conference in London,
Berezovsky played segments of a French documentary outlining
circumstantial evidence of alleged FSB involvement in the explosions.
Berezovky and Sergei Yushenkov, co-chairs of the political movement
Liberal Russia, said the group would ask the Council of Europe—an
intergovernmental organization established to promote human rights and
democracy in Europe—to investigate the explosions.
In Russia, a spokesman for the FSB told the Interfax news agency that
Berezovsky's allegations were "groundless and lacking in common sense."
Russian officials instead accused Berezovsky of channeling money to
Chechen rebels, and said Tuesday that they were considering asking
Interpol to issue an arrest warrant on charges that Berezovsky financed
the separatists.
Berezovsky has evaded the charges by moving to London. He calls the
charges politically motivated.
The evidence Berezovsky presented Tuesday centers on an incident in
September 1999 in the city of Ryazan, where police evacuated a building
after finding what appeared to be explosives.
Police and government officials initially said they had foiled a
terrorist attack, but the FSB later said the explosives had been fakes
used in a training exercise. The incident has been extensively examined
over the years.
Berezovsky and his supporters also point to claims by Nikita Chekulin,
a former government explosives expert who says he has amassed evidence
of an alleged FSB plot to move combat-grade explosives across Russia
disguised as ordinary industrial material.
Berezovsky also said the investigation should look at the actions of
Putin, who headed the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, until
August 1999. Putin was prime minister at the time of the apartment
bombings.
He said Putin "knew that such things were taking place ... Either he
could have prevented a terrorist attack and didn't do it, or he was
passive."
But Russian authorities have their own claims of Berezovsky's alleged
connection to Chechen rebels.
Pavel Barkovsky, deputy head of the Russian prosecutor general's
special investigations department, was quoted by ITAR-Tass as saying
authorities were investigating claims that Berezovsky was involved in
the 2000 abduction and murder of the Interior Ministry's envoy to
Chechnya, Gen. Gennadi Shpigun.
Prosecutors could soon issue an international arrest warrant for
Berezovsky if they can find evidence to back up their claims, he was
quoted by ITAR-Tass and Interfax as saying.
Once one of Russia's richest and most powerful businessmen with
interests in banking, oil, broadcasting and airlines, Berezovsky was
closely linked to former President Boris Yeltsin. He was an early
supporter of Putin, but in the last two years he has become a vocal
Kremlin critic.
Copyright 2002 The Associated Press | Privacy Information
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/06/international/europe/06RUSS.html
March 6, 2002
A Film Clip, and Charges of a Kremlin Plot
By MICHAEL WINES
LONDON, March 5 — As he had promised for weeks, Boris A. Berezovsky,
the Russian tycoon-in-exile, released part of a film today claiming to
document the role of the Kremlin's intelligence service in the 1999
string of apartment-house bombings in which more than 300 Russians
perished.
Russian authorities have blamed Islamic extremists from Chechnya for
the bombings. But Mr. Berezovsky, in part of a long-running struggle
with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, escalated his accusations
today, saying that Mr. Putin knew "at a minimum" that intelligence
services were tied to the bombings yet still failed to stop them.
The nine-minute film excerpt shown during Mr. Berezovsky's news
conference here raised troubling questions about the responsibility for
the bombings, but those questions were not new. The most compelling
aspect of Mr. Berezovsky's carefully staged attack today was not any
new evidence tying the Kremlin to the blasts, but the Russian
government's continuing unwillingness or inability to refute his
charges.
A spokesman for the Federal Security Service, the successor to the
Soviet K.G.B. and the target of the accusations, dismissed the charges
today as polemics. Mr. Putin has previously likened the accusations to
blasphemy.
Mr. Berezovsky, vastly rich and powerful during Boris N. Yeltsin's
presidency in the 1990's, used his influence to help propel Mr. Putin
into power in 2000. But the two have since fallen out, with Mr.
Berezovsky becoming a virulent political opponent who says he has been
forced into exile in Britain by threats from the Kremlin of corruption
charges if he returns to Russia.
Both Mr. Berezovsky and the leader of Liberal Russia, a new Russian
political faction that he supports, called today for a Russian and
international inquiry into the bombings.
The video clip is part of a longer film that Mr. Berezovsky said he
wants broadcast on Russian television. He contends that the 1999
bombings were a plot by the Federal Security Service to propel Mr.
Putin, the agency's former director, into the presidency.
Mr. Putin was President Yeltsin's prime minister when the bombings took
place in September 1999. The attacks galvanized support behind his
later decision to begin a full-scale invasion of Chechnya, the
breakaway province that is home to a rebellion against rule from Moscow
and to foreign Muslim militants. Mr. Putin's war fed a wave of Russian
patriotism that sealed his election to the presidency in March 2000.
The blasts destroyed two apartment blocks in southern Moscow, a
military barracks in Dagestan and a third apartment house in the
southwest city of Volgodonsk. But Mr. Berezovsky's charges against the
intelligence agency are rooted in the city of Ryazan, where local
police officers found and defused a fifth bomb, which had been placed,
like most of the others, in the basement of an apartment building, in
that case one 12 stories high.
The Kremlin initially praised the police for averting a disaster. But
the director of the Federal Security Service soon said the device —
first identified by police as several sacks of explosives linked to a
shotgun- shell detonator and timer — was a fake.
He said it consisted of sacks of sugar and a fake detonator planted by
his agency as part of an ill-considered exercise.
All evidence in the incident was ordered kept secret for 75 years, and
the intelligence officials responsible for the Ryazan incident have
never been identified. Nor have those who detonated bombs in the other
cases been arrested, although the security service claims to know their
identities.
The Russian Parliament, staunchly loyal to the Kremlin, has repeatedly
failed to muster the votes for an independent inquiry into the bombings
or the Ryazan incident.
Mr. Berezovsky contended today, as others have before, that the Federal
Security Service talked of a supposed antiterrorism exercise in Ryazan
because the police there were on the trail of its officers and
threatened to make the true story public.
Mr. Berezovsky suggested that Mr. Putin could not evade responsibility
for the blasts because he had run the intelligence service until
becoming prime minister only months before the bombings occurred.
"Either he could have prevented a terrorist attack and he didn't do it,
or, alternatively, he was passive," Mr. Berezovsky said.
Mr. Berezovsky's avowed new role as a crusader for openness and
democracy is at odds with the view of many Russians that he was
essentially Mr. Yeltsin's shadow president and that he is driven by a
desire for revenge.
Since Mr. Putin became president, Mr. Berezovsky has lost his stakes in
Russian television networks ORT and TV-6 and has been charged by
Russian prosecutors with money laundering and conspiracy to embezzle
millions from Aeroflot, the Russian airline over which he won control
in the 1990's.
Today he said his motive "is to urge the world's community to pay
particular attention to these events," and he promised that a future
release of documents related to the case will make the ties between the
bombings and the Russian government clearer.
"We plan to appeal to all international organizations which are able to
apply certain measures to help an investigation in Russia to take
place," he said. "And President Putin's name almost definitely will be
mentioned."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
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