'Angry Beslan Mothers Blame Putin, Demand Trial for Authorities'

Moscow News - 24th August 2005

ORIGINAL LINK: http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/08/24/beslanprotests.shtml

15 members of the Beslan Mothers Committee continued their protest in the building of North Ossetia’s Supreme Court, remaining there till Wednesday morning. The women accused the authorities of incompetence and corruption.

The Committee blames last year’s hostage crisis on the government and insists that officials should face trial, not Nurpashi Kulayev, the only hostage-taker charged in the hostage drama.

“We are to meet with Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel later today to discuss a statement written on Tuesday,” a protester told Interfax. Earlier reports said that the women remained last night in the Supreme Court building, where a suspect in the Beslan school siege, Nurashi Kulayev, was being tried on Tuesday.

A source earlier told Interfax that “in a letter to the Russian prosecutor general, the women demanded the prosecution of members of the emergency committee formed to deal with the hostage crisis in Beslan on Sept. 1, 2004.”

The Beslan Mothers argued that officials from the emergency committee, not Kulayev, must be prosecuted first. They also mentioned President Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s FSB security service, Nikolai Patrushev, among those who had to be brought to account for the deaths of their children.

“What about President Putin himself?” asked one of the activists, Ella Petrozova, in an interview for AFP news agency. “Where was he during those three days when our children were held hostage?”

More than 300 people, many of them children, died during the siege. The only alleged hostage-taker to survive, Nurpashi Kulayev, is standing trial. After many weeks of testimony, the first child witnesses gave harrowing evidence about the death of classmates, BBC News reported.

A court statement warned the mothers that their protest was “an attempt to pressure the court and an attempt to force a court decision not based on objective evidence”.

Ceremonies are due to be held in Beslan on Sept. 1-3 to commemorate the first anniversary of the deaths, most of which were apparently caused when explosives planted by the hostage-takers inside the school went off.