…WHO WAS COMPLICIT? “

Agents of the [Russian] Special Services were in Baraev’s Band,” journalist Murat Khairullin wrote in the October 29 issue of Moskovskie Komsommolets. A man in his forties had asked for a meeting with a correspondent from the newspaper and had then identified himself as an employee of Russian military intelligence. There were, he specified, four such Special Services agents among the fifty or so terrorists who had seized the Moscow theater. “From this it emerges that it would have been possible to avert the tragedy.” Another man, employed at one of the analytical centers of one of the Russian special services, who was unaware of what the GRU informant had already said, “confirmed the words of the other source: Within Baraev’s group [he said] were very deeply inserted Chechen agents who had been there for a long time.” Obviously, Khairullin emphasized, this information needs to be carefully checked.