The prosecution at the trial of 58 young men charged with participating
in the October 13, 2005, multiple attacks on police and security
facilities in Nalchik, capital of the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic
(KBR), has begun to read out the formal indictment against them. The
document contains a number of factual errors.
Meanwhile,
lawyers for the accused continue to protest the recent legislative
amendments that deny persons accused on charges related to "terrorism"
the right to a jury trial.
According to the official account of
what happened, the October 2005 attacks were perpetrated by between
100-200 young Muslim militants alienated by systematic brutal police
harassment of nonviolent but devout Muslims. Although the attacks were
reportedly planned by veteran Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev,
many of the young men in question had received only minimal military
training. Basayev disapproved of the plan that was presented to him by
Astemirov and others and told them they weren't ready to fight. The
local jamaat decided to go ahead anyway.
In fighting that
lasted only a few hours, they failed in their imputed bid to take
control of six Interior Ministry posts and numerous other premises
targeted, including the city airport and two stores that sold weapons.
According to the official account, a total of 35 police and security
personnel, and 14 civilian residents of the city, were killed in the
fighting. On October 14, the number of attackers killed was given as
72; 48 hours later the figure was revised to 95.
But the
families of at least some of the dead young men dispute the official
version, "Kommersant" reported on March 31, quoting their lawyer,
Larisa Dorogova. They say the number of attackers was much lower --
around 40 -- and that they sought simply to "avenge themselves on the
police," rather than to take control of all police and Federal Security
Service (FSB) facilities in the city. In addition, the families of at
least some of the dead young men identified by police as active
participants in the attacks insist that they were either innocent
victims of crossfire, or they were detained by police after the
fighting was over, and their families were later informed of their
death, allegedly during the fighting.
The bodies of the 95
identified as active participants in the fighting were cremated
secretly in June 2006. Their families, who had repeatedly appealed to
KBR President Arsen Kanokov to release the bodies for burial, were
informed of the cremation only one year later.
The preliminary
hearings in the trial began in October 2007 in a specially built
courthouse in Nalchik. Then in May 2008, the KBR Supreme Court embarked
on the process of selecting jury members. Hundreds of potential jurors
were summoned over a period of many months, almost all of whom
requested to be exempted. Despite protests from the Public Chamber, in
December 2008 both chambers of the Russian parliament approved a bill
proposed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to abolish jury trials in
cases involving terrorism or violent crime.
The indictment,
which the prosecution began reading out on April 14, not only reaffirms
the authorities' official version of what happened, but elaborates on
it in the light of subsequent developments.
It claims that the
attackers sought to seize control of the entire city of Nalchik as a
preliminary to establishing an Islamic state that encompassed the
entire North Caucasus, an objective proclaimed only in late 2007 by
Chechen resistance commander Doku Umarov.
The indictment also
overstates the strength of the combined North Caucasus resistance (the
various units fighting in Chechnya, Daghestan and Kabardino-Balkaria),
in the period prior to the Nalchik attacks, claiming that "between late
1999 and 2005 the leaders of the self-proclaimed Chechen Republic
Ichkeria A. Maskhadov, and Sh. Basayev, the Arab mercenaries Abu
Al-Walid and Abu-Dzeit, and others created on the territory of the
North Caucasus republics a large organized criminal association with
the aim of resisting federal forces, separating the North Caucasus from
the rest of the Russian Federation and creating a single Islamic state
on its territory."
The indictment further exaggerates the role
in that alleged process of Anzor Astemirov (aka Seyfullakh),
identifying him as commander of the Kabardino-Balkaria jamaat months
before he assumed that post in the summer of 2005. That jamaat was the
successor to the Yarmuk jamaat, most of whose members were killed in an
operation by security forces in January 2005. A recent denunciation of
Astemirov posted on chechenpress.info, the website of the moderate
Chechen Republic Ichkeria resistance in exile that adamantly rejects
the idea of a North Caucasus Islamic state as opposed to an independent
Chechnya, alleged
both that Astemirov was the mastermind behind the plans for a North
Caucasus Islamic state, and that he had been suborned in April 2001 by
the FSB.
Astemirov continues to command the Kabardino-Balkaria
jamaat, which is accused of the shooting in November 2007 of a group of
nine Russian hunters. The jamaat issued a press release
on April 14 warning that "a war is under way in our land between
Muslims and nonbelievers," and that civilians should refrain from
entering forest areas as "many roads and paths are mined."
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