MASKHADOV DENIES INVOLVEMENT IN 1999 BOMBINGS.

In a statement issued by Chechenpress.com on February 13, Chechen separatist President Aslan Maskhadov observed: “Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and Federal Security Service boss Nikolai Patrushev are still touting the myth that Chechens were behind the [September 1999] terror bombings that sparked Moscow’s genocidal war. In exile in London, Boris Berezovsky, the Russian king-maker fallen from grace, promises to reveal the opposite…. In any case, once more the Chechen Republic unequivocally refutes any moral or material complicity in the 1999 bombings and asks such bodies of the international community as are willing to launch a transparent and nonpartisan investigation into their origins [to do so].”

Writing in the February 13 issue of the New York Times, journalist Patrick Tyler reported on his recent visit to the city of Ryazan, southwest of Moscow, where, according to oligarch Boris Berezovsky and others, a huge bomb was placed by FSB personnel on September 22, 1999 underneath an apartment complex housing 600 residents. “We don’t know if Berezovsky is right or not,” one resident remarked to Tyler, “but I personally don’t believe it was an exercise, because the local security officials were taking their investigation so seriously.”