JQuinton has the story. My thoughts on this are mixed. It's been awhile since I lived in Russia, but there was a pretty consistent theme among the population when I was there: blame the Chechens. And I don't mean blame them for all acts of terrorism, which is probably a pretty fair assumption to make in Russia, but I mean blame them for everything. It was pretty much agreed upon by everyone I talked to that Chechens were responsible for much of the criminal enterprises in the Moscow region. Another thought is that the Moscow police aren't the most professional organization in the world and don't hesitate to beat confessions out of prisoners--especially prisoners who have, shall we say, 'darker skin'? I'm not going to say I'm skeptical about the arrests--rather, we'll call it a healthy neutrality until all the facts come to light.

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Amen, and pass the ammunition!! AP:

President Vladimir Putin urged journalists Friday to use their work to advance the battle against terrorism, saying the media should not just be passive observers in the face of threats by militants.

"It is obvious that the struggle against terrorism cannot be an excuse to infringe upon the freedom and independence of the press," Putin told an international media conference organized by Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency.

"But you yourselves, as professionals, should develop a model of work that would allow media to become an effective instrument in the struggle against terror, which would exclude any, even involuntary, form of assistance to terrorists' goals."

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The good news is that post-9/11 measures have decreased the flow of money--especially out of the Gulf States--the bad news is that terrorists don't need a lot of money for operations. Moscow Times:

Wealthy Chechen businessmen and Islamic and pro-Chechen charities in the Persian Gulf, Jordan, Turkey, Europe and the United States once accounted for most of the hundreds of millions of dollars in fundraising. It was mostly done through a far-flung Chechen diaspora and Islamic charities often using murky and secret transactions that are difficult to track.

Now the money is smuggled into Chechnya largely by private businessmen traveling through Azerbaijan, the Chechen activists and experts said.

The largest contributions are believed to still be from the gulf, with smaller amounts moving through Turkey, Europe, Islamic states and even North America.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Treasury Department accused an American arm of a Saudi charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, of links to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The department alleged the charity tried to conceal funds intended for Chechnya by omitting them from tax returns and mischaracterizing their use.

The Treasury Department also said there were allegations that donations made to Al-Haramain for Chechen refugees were diverted to rebels and Chechen leaders affiliated with al-Qaida.

"Finances have been flowing into Chechnya in support of both the global jihad and the separatist movement," said Molly Millerwise, a spokeswoman at the Treasury Department.

Aid groups insist the money they collect is for refugees and infrastructure in Chechnya, but Chechens and terrorism financing experts say at least part of the funds is diverted to fighters.

"Money for refugees, it never existed," Nasho said. "The money went to the fighters."

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Screw the Chechens, they do not deserve a state. ABC News:

Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility on Friday for the Russian school siege in which more than 320 hostages were killed, half of them children, and threatened further attacks by any means he saw fit.

Also on the scene to report terrorist scumbags: Treacherous Quinton Dogg
more...

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The first indictment in relation to the Beslan school massacre has been filed against Nurpasha Kulaev, a Chechen national, on at least nine charges, Pravda reports. Pravda also reports that authorities have recovered the bodies of at least 30 terrorists. Ten terrorists, so far, have been identified by nationality. One hundred and twenty-two former hostages are still hospitalized. Fifty adults and 25 children are listed in critical condition. Elsewhere, Chechens downed a Mi-24 helicopter on Monday, killing two crew members. In news that is probably somehow tangentially related to Kitty Kelley, Pravda also warns of UFO clouds abducting humans.

CNN is reporting that it was a 'bribe' that got the two female Chechen suicide bombers on board a flight they later managed to blow up. The names of the two suspected terrorists are Aminat Nagayeva and Satsia Dzhebirkhanova. No word if that was cash or Visa.

Two illegally scalped tickets, including airline bribe: $69-$100.
The chance to blow up a plane full of infidels: priceless. more...

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Georgy Farniyev, pictured below next to a terrorist who stands on a pressure device hooked to a bomb set to go off if he removes his foot, tells his story of what happened in Beslan. Story in extended entry.

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Ten of the terrorists who committed mass-murder in Beslan have been identified by Russian security forces. AP: Six came from Chechnya, where insurgents have been battling Kremlin forces for five years. The other four came from Ingushetia, a republic neighboring Chechnya that saw brazen coordinated attacks against police in June. Other reports suggest that at least nine more are Arabs.

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You can't make this stuff up. Really. The funny part? He gaver her the money that she used to take the contract out on him. Apparently it was too little. Mosnews:

A 23-year-old former Miss Moscow contestant has avoided a prison sentence for ordering a contract hit by marrying her intended victim...
more...

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1 That first home cooked meal will be a pisser!

Posted by: Walter E. Wallis at September 09, 2004 02:09 PM (7XPVo)

2 It's pure impudence: hiring lawyers to defends this ungrateful black widow. I'm awaiting your imputent follow up post with pure impudentation. It'll be entitled "Ex-Beauty Queen Not Satisfied With $15 Million Dollar Diamond Wedding Ring"

Posted by: Digger at September 09, 2004 02:28 PM (FYEx6)

3 Ha!! I'm actually trying to find pics of her. I mean, she's not that hot, is she?

Posted by: RS at September 09, 2004 02:44 PM (JQjhA)

4 My, how times have changed. Back in the mid-90's that hit would have cost her $500. Jeez, inflation's everywhere, huh?

Posted by: Tim Worstall at September 10, 2004 04:10 AM (czhuR)

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The Bush-Rumsfield Neocon cabal has obviously infiltrated Russia to the highest levels. Like I've been saying since 9/11, this is a civilizational war. The events in Beslan have clarified things for the Russians. 9/11 was not a declaration of war, it simply woke us up from our slumbering false insecurity. War had been declared on us years before. Yahoo News:

Russia is prepared to make pre-emptive strikes on "terrorist bases" anywhere in the world, the Interfax news agency cited the country's chief of staff as saying.

"With regard to preventive strikes on terrorist bases, we will take any action to eliminate terrorist bases in any region of the world. But this does not mean we will carry out nuclear strikes," General Yuri Baluyevsky said Wednesday.

Baluyevsky added that Russia's choice of action "will be determined by the concrete situation where ever it may be in the world.

"Military action is the last resort in the fight agaisnt terrorism."

For an abbreviated history of recent events in Chechnya, see McQ's A short primer on Chechnya

UPDATE: Chechens respond (via Jeff Quinton):

A London-based Chechen rebel representative said Wednesday that Russia's threats to attack terrorists around the world amount to a warning to European countries that Russian forces could carry out assassinations on their soil.

Akhmed Zakayev, an envoy for rebel leader and former Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, said such a strike by Russian forces would create a dangerous precedent.

"It is a warning to other European countries that Russia may come and carry out an assassination on your soil at any moment," he said....

[...]"It is a very disturbing signal they are sending for all civilized countries," Zakayev said. He added that it's especially worrying for Chechens who speak freely about their dissatisfaction with Russian President Vladimir Putin's policies.

"To Putin, that makes them international terrorists," he said.

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Now you're talking baby. Carrot and stick, carrot and stick. Anyone know what they mean by neutralization?Channel News Asia

Russia put a 10-million-dollar price tag on the heads of two Chechen rebel leaders accused of masterminding the hostage-taking which ended in a bloodbath at a Beslan school.

The FSB security service, in a statement quoted by Interfax news agency, said Wednesday that it would pay 300 million rubles "for reliable information on their whereabouts leading to the neutralization" of former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and of warlord Shamil Basayev.

It said the two were responsible for "inhuman" acts of terrorism carried out in Russia.

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For latest news, information, images, and links to other hostage videos please go to MAIN PAGE HERE.

UPDATE: 9/13 Video here. (in German)

Chad over at In the Bullpen alerted me to the fact that the Chechen terrorists made a video tape of themselves while they were busy massacring children. The Chechen terrorists in Beslan, North Ossetia seem to be following the lead of the Chechens who held a Moscow theater hostage last year--they also shot a video. Chad noticed Yahoo News was running some vidcaps from the terrorist's video. I did some checking around and found these posted at NTV.RU. None are too graphic. NTV is the station that has a copy of the tape, but they have not posted the video and I presume the whole thing is much too graphic to air on Russian television (which is saying a lot). The pics are in the extended entry below. The NTV video can be viewed here, it's not very graphic and it's narrated in Russian.

UPDATE: On closer inspection the last few seconds of the video are disturbing. Vidcap #3 below is taken from a shot where you hear a voice in the background. The voice is talking to someone on a cell-phone. He is not speaking Russian. He is either speaking Turkic or Arabic, but he distinctly can be heard speaking the Arabic phrase "Allahu-Akhbar". The next scene is disturbing if brief. The camera looks down at blood on the ground and pans past what look to be the legs and arms of dead children. You cannot see their full bodies, just a brief glimpse as the camera pans past to focus on the blood. Horrible.

Update II: Allah also has some of the same images as does Charles Johnson, and of course Chad Evans where I first got tipped of this. Petrified Truth also has some links to NTV. Jay Tea at Wizbang ponders the question: what next? Captain Ed on the horror's that the media don't want you to see.

Update III: More pics found. Also below.

Update IV: Via Dale Franks and Chad Evans this news:

While despairing soldiers and rescue workers moved among the growing pile of body bags, it was revealed that an 18-month-old baby had been repeatedly stabbed by a black-clad terrorist who had run out of ammunition.

Other survivors told how screaming teenage girls were dragged into rooms adjoining the gymnasium where they were being held and raped by their Chechen captors who chillingly made a video film of their appalling exploits

UPDATE V: More pics below.

UPDATE VI: Via Michael J. Totten at Suicide Girls this Telegraph piece:

An extremist Islamic cleric based in Britain said yesterday that he would support hostage-taking at British schools if carried out by terrorists with a just cause.

Omar Bakri Mohammed, the spiritual leader of the extremist sect al-Muhajiroun, said that holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course of action for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule....

"The Mujahideen [Chechen rebels] would not have wanted to kill those people, because it is strictly forbidden as a Muslim to deliberately kill women and children. It is the fault of the Russians," he said.

UPDATE VII: Click here for the BBC version of the video. Very close to original. more...

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Dan Darling does a great job of supplying the background info necessary to understand the Chechen conflict. He also delves into the connections between the jihadists and the Chechen nationalists. They run deep. It is possible that Chechens have a legitimate bone to pick with their Russian masters and I don't find it hard to believe that the Russian military is guilty of war crimes in Chechnya. However, the Chechens have chosen our enemies as allies. They chose unwisely. Now is the time to back the Russians in their efforts to annhialate the jihadi movement in Chechnya and surrounding provinces. It will be an ugly campaign, but no uglier than the campaign that wiped National Socialism off the map.

The country [Chechnya] was taken over by a mixture of international terrorist organizations, Wahhabi theocrats, drug cartels, and other criminal organizations that subsided more or less on generous funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

This funding helped the Wahhabis to finalize control over the institutional infrastructure of the de facto independent state and led for calls for the imposition of sha'riah even though most Chechens (and Caucasus Muslims in general) are Sufis. The al-Qaeda presence in Chechnya was headed up by bin Laden's protege Amir ibn al-Khattab, a Saudi national who had previously assisted Islamic fighters in the Tajik Civil War and the Armenia-Azerbaijan War over Nagorno-Karabakh.

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Horrible. Sickened. Update from Stan who is translating original Russian sources: "ex hostages are saying that terrorists began killing hostages before the storm." Now we see why the Russians had to go in. Reuters:

Russian troops stormed a school Friday in a chaotic battle to free hundreds of parents, teachers and children who had been held hostage for two days by Chechen separatists.

Naked and screaming children ran for safety amid machinegun fire and explosions while attack helicopters clattered overhead. The Tass and Interfax news agencies spoke of over 300 wounded, mostly children. Rebels fled with soldiers in pursuit.

Witnesses at the scene in Beslan, in the North Ossetia region near Chechnya, saw several bodies on stretchers and Russian news agencies said at least seven people had been dead on arrival at hospital.

Half- or fully naked children gulped from bottles of water after two days without drink in a stiflingly hot and crowded school. Some lay on stretchers.

Jeff Quinton has been updating frequently and as always is the best resource for following the blogosphere reaction. Michelle Malkin and The Belmont Club, too. The Command Post and Allah are keeping up as well.

Stan at Logic and Sanity should be awake in a few and (he's back) has been liveblogging this for days. He speaks fluent Russian and is translating the news out of Russia.

The Laughing Wolf also speaks Russian and is taking up the slack for Stan. Very good resource.

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Russia goes into post-9/11 mode.

From Radio Free Europe:

Among the many dramatic statements made over the last week in the heat of the unfolding events, perhaps the strongest came from Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on 1 September. "War has been declared, a war in which the enemy is invisible and there is no front line," Ivanov said in a statement that was repeatedly broadcast on the national television channels. He said that the 31 August suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station "was not the first and not the last terrorist" act that Russia will see in this now-open war.

State Duma Speaker and former Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov echoed Ivanov's statements in remarks the same day. "It is time for all those who tried to romanticize acts of madness, who try to present acts of terrorism as a lonely struggle for independence and justice, to come to the only proper conclusion: this is war," Gryzlov said, according to "Vremya novostei" on 2 September. He added that the war is being waged by well-financed and well-organized groups with international ties. "We are obliged to undertake measures commensurate with this situation," Gryzlov added. He said that the front line in this war "passes through the entire country" and the new situation "demands particular vigilance from everyone."

Gryzlov also said that new legislative initiatives in keeping with the new, wartime situation are being drafted and will be presented to the Duma in short order. He added that many of these initiatives are being drafted by law-enforcement and security agencies themselves, including the Justice Ministry, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Interior Ministry.

Regardless of the possibility--and it is only a possibility--for abuse, the news that the Russians are going into post 9/11 mode is a good sign.

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The terrorists have released 32 hostages. The names of 25 of them have been released in Russian. I have transliterated the names below. They seem to be mostly infants and their immediate caregivers. Stan at Logic and Sanity is updating constantly. more...

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John 11:35 "Jesus wept." Fox News:

Two large blasts went off Thursday near a school in southern Russia, where militants were holding hundreds of children and adults hostage.

The extremists were said to be heavily armed — some with bombs strapped to their bodies — as the standoff entered a second day. About 350 hostages were being held after terrorists stormed the school early Wednesday.

The explosions shook the area about 10 minutes apart, leaving a plume of black smoke in their wake. A soldier told FOX News that the terrorists fired on a car and that was the apparent source of the explosion.

The militants were also sporadically firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles from the school, FOX News has learned.

Update: Sigh of relief. Jeff pointed out that the Command Post is reporting that the terrorist scumbags blew up a car outside the building. A short reprieve, at the very least. Let's hope this situation turns out better than what I am expecting.

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Updates: See this post. The school has been stormed and hundreds dead.

Savages. This hostage crisis represents a clear turn in tactics among Muslim insurgents. The hostage takers appear to be Chechen, but their demands are not related to the Islamic insurgency in the Caucuses. Rather, they claim that this is about the undeclared war between Russia and Georgia in South Ossetia. Please see this post for background. What is so frightening about this is that it represents an alliance of convenience between Islamic terrorists and Christian Georgians. Both have a common enemy in Russia, although, I find it hard to believe that any Georgians knew of this attack in advance. However, it is evidence that terrorists will back nation-states, even ones that they consider immoral on theologic grounds, for the sake of common enemies and more immediate goals. NY Times:

Heavily armed insurgents, some with explosives strapped to their bodies, seized a school in southern Russia today and herded scores of schoolchildren and others into its gymnasium.

More than a dozen guerrillas, including men and women, stormed Middle School No. 1 in the town of Beslan in the republic of North Ossetia, not far from Chechnya on Russia's southern border with Georgia, just moments after the opening of the new school year, according to officials there and news reports.

Gunfire erupted during the seizure and afterwards. At least 3 people were reported killed and at least 10 wounded, according to preliminary accounts.

The local police, as well as special forces and soldiers from Russia's 58th Army, surrounded the school, creating a nervous stand-off that continued into this afternoon. Rossiya, the state television network, showed a camouflaged soldier racing a young girl, dressed in a light lavender dress, to safety.

With the school in their hands and evidently trip-wired with explosives, the guerrillas released one hostage with a list of demands, officials told official news agencies. Later the guerrillas freed 15 more hostages and Russian news agencies said 50 children escaped during a lull in the fighting.

A man who answered the telephone at the school and identified himself as "the press secretary" of the fighters said they wanted talks with the leaders of North Ossetia and neighboring Ingushetia, as well as with a pediatrician who took part in negotiations with insurgents who seized a Moscow theater in October 2002.

"Wipe your sniffles," the man said, speaking in Russian with a distinct Chechen accent, when asked what they wanted to discuss with the officials, and then hung up.

Hat tip: Jeff Quinton. I will be in class all morning, Jeff's site will be a good resource to use for more immediate updates.

Others bloggers: Dean Esmay, Blogs of War, Spoons, Allah (technically a deity, not a blogger), Ace

Stan at Logic and Sanity is live-blogging the crisis.

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