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http://www.jamestown.org/chechnya_weekly/article.php?articleid=2374221

(June 11, 2008)

Voice of Beslan Asks Prosecutor General’s Office to Probe Putin

http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/uploads/2341Beslan2.jpg

Members of the Voice of Belsan human rights group, which represents victims
of the September 2004 terrorist act, issued a statement on June 4 demanding
that the Prosecutor General’s Office question and launch a criminal case
against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in connection with his handling of the
terrorist hostage-taking in Beslan and bloody denouement. “In our statement
to the Prosecutor General we are asking to investigate the actions of former
President Vladimir Putin and question him for an explanation of the
circumstances surrounding the rejection of negotiations [with the Beslan
hostage takers] and the use of tanks, flamethrowers, grenade launchers on
the school building [in which the hostages were held],” the Sobkor website
quoted Voice of Beslan co-chair Ella Kesaeva as saying. “We are also asking
for the filing of criminal charges with respect to former President Vladimir
Putin in accordance with a number of articles of the Russian Federation
Criminal Code.”

The Voice of Beslan said the reason they asked the Prosecutor General’s
Office to question Putin and investigate him for criminal wrongdoing was his
interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, published on May 31, in which
he defended the actions of the security forces during the Beslan incident.
Specifically, Putin was asked whether he could have acted differently in
both the Beslan hostage crisis and the Moscow theater siege of October
2002-whether it would have been possible, as the interviewer put it, “to
resolve this problem in a different way.” Putin responded: “No. I am certain
that if we had tried to resolve it differently, it would all still be
continuing. One might have counted on more effective activity, maybe, by our
special units, special services, but that we had to stop . these attempts to
destabilize the situation in Russia is completely obvious. And any country
in the world . the moment it makes concessions to terrorists, in the end it
will suffer greater losses than those that occur while carrying out a
special operation. In the final analysis, this tears down the state and
increases the number of victims.”

continued.