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Then something strange happened. On the evening of September 22, 1999, a bus driver, returning home in Ryazan, a city about 130 miles southeast from Moscow, saw two suspicious-looking men carrying big sacks into the basement of the apartment building where he lived. On the license plate of their car was pasted a piece of paper with the number 62, the region code of Ryazan. The man immediately called the police, and when the policemen arrived they discovered in the basement three 50 kg sacks of a white powder. The sacks were connected to a detonator, batteries, and a clock with the timer set for 5:30 next morning. Immediately thirty thousand residents in the neighborhood were evacuated. The sacks contained the highly explosive substance hexogen that had also been used in the previous bombings. The local police, analyzing mobile telephone calls that were made immediately after the event, arrested two men in connection with the terrorist attempt. To the great surprise of the policemen, the two suspects showed ID cards of the secret service FSB. It took the FSB some time to react. But on September 24 FSB chief Nikolay Patrushev announced that it had only been an exercise to test the vigilance of the police and the population. The substance of the sacks, identified by experts as hexogen, was said to have been just ordinary sugar. This version, however, was contested by Yury Tkachenko, the explosives expert who had defused the bomb. In an interview in February 2000 with Pavel Voloshin, a journalist of the paper Novaya Gazeta, Tkachenko insisted that the vapors coming from the sacks had been analyzed by a sophisticated gas analyzer and that the device had clearly indicated the presence of hexogen. Also the detonator was a professional one, one that was used by the army.^[11] According to the paper Kommersant an explosion in the twelve-floor building in Ryazan would have killed about 240 people.^[12]

Foresight or Leaked Information?

Other strange things happened in this period—even before the wave of explosions started. There were, for instance, two Western journalists, who—quoting anonymous sources—announced the events two months before they actually took place. On June 6, 1999, Jan Blomgren, the Moscow correspondent for the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, wrote that one option being considered by the Kremlin and its associates was “terror bombings in Moscow which could be blamed on the Chechens.”^[13] A similar statement was made by Giulio Chiesa, the Moscow correspondent for the Italian paper La Stampa, who wrote an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of June 16, 1999, with the title Terroristy tozhe raznye (There are also different kinds of terrorists), indicating that terrorist methods can be used, not only by rebel groups, but also by governments.^[14] In a second article, written after the explosions, Chiesa emphasized the plausibility of the latter option, pointing to the extreme professionalism of the terror attacks. According to him, for the nine explosions that were planned the terrorists needed more than two tons of hexogen and “in Russia hexogen is produced only in a factory in Perm, in the Urals,” which would mean that “tons of explosives disappear from a top-secret factory and circulate throughout Russia.”^[15] Chiesa also stressed the fact that the explosives “were positioned in an extremely professional way, under the bearing structures of the buildings, in such a way as to make them collapse like a house of cards.”^[16]