Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

Another clue hinting at the involvement of the FSB was an open letter, published on March 14, 2005, in the Novaya Gazeta. The open letter was written by Achemez Gochiyaev, a native of Karachaevo-Cherkessia in the North Caucasus, who was sought by the police in connection with the apartment bombings.^[25] Gochiyaev told how, before the bombings, he had been contacted by a certain Ramazan Dyshekov, a former classmate, with a business proposal to sell mineral water. In order to stock the water, the other had told him, it was necessary to rent basements in apartment buildings in Moscow and Ryazan. After the second explosion in Moscow Gochiyaev sensed he had been trapped, suspecting that Dyshekov was an FSB agent. He called the police and gave the addresses of other buildings where basements were rented. That is how other explosions in Moscow were able to be prevented. In his open letter Gochiyaev accused the FSB of having organized the Moscow bombings and Dyshekov of being an FSB agent. He asked for an independent, international investigation.

The Duma Investigation Commission

In such a serious situation, in which there are allegations that a government has used state terror against its own citizens, one would expect a government to do anything to clear its name and remove any doubt. “The idea that the secret services might have had something to do with the apartment bombings evoked indignation in Putin,” the Moscow Times wrote. “To even speculate about this is immoral and in essence none other than an element of the information war against Russia,” he was quoted as saying.^[26] By qualifying investigation as speculation and speculating as immoral, Putin obviously wanted to block any serious investigation into the facts. The problem, however, was that the facts that had emerged revealed so many unsolved problems and contradictions that they only strengthened the rumors of involvement of the government and the secret services. A government that has nothing to hide would be anxious that a thorough and impartial investigation would take place, in which the investigators would be given full, complete, and unrestricted access to all documents and to any further information that they deemed relevant. However, it was not the government, but the Duma that established an investigation commission in 2002. On July 25, 2002, the members of the Duma Commission organized a teleconference from Moscow with Alexander Litvinenko, Yury Felshtinsky, and Tatyana Morozova, who were in London. The first two were the authors of the book FSB vzryvaet Rossiyu (translated in English with the title Blowing Up Russia), in which they accused the FSB of being behind the apartment bombings.^[27] The president of the Duma Commission, Sergey Kovalyov (the former president of Yeltsin’s Presidential Human Rights Commission), complained that the government did not give the information requested and was hiding itself behind “state secrets.”^[28]