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| Putin foe links him to
'99 bombings Tycoon says Russia was behind deadly blasts blamed on Chechens David Hoffman, Washington Post |
Wednesday, March 6, 2002
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London -- A Russian tycoon charged yesterday that Russian President Vladimir Putin knew the country's special services were involved in the bombing of apartment houses in Moscow and other cities in September 1999 in which nearly 300 people died. Boris Berezovsky, who has been feuding with Putin since the autumn of 2000, leveled the charge at a news conference in which he offered what appeared to be extremely sketchy and circumstantial evidence suggesting the authorities were behind the bombings to help get Putin elected. Earlier, the Kremlin had blamed Chechen rebels for the attacks. Putin has previously rejected the charge as "delirious nonsense." Yesterday, Russian prosecutors responded that Berezovsky was raising the allegation to deflect attention from investigations into his financial dealings. The horrific blasts in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buinaksk between Sept. 4 and Sept. 19, 1999, stunned Russia and proved a turning point in war and politics. Russian officials have said their investigation pointed to Chechnya, though they never found proof or arrested the perpetrators. The explosions galvanized support for a military offensive against Chechnya in late 1999 and played a key role in boosting the popularity of Putin, who was then the newly appointed prime minister. By pledging to rub out the Chechens, Putin became enormously popular and outdistanced all other contenders to succeed then-President Boris Yeltsin. On New Year's Eve 1999, Yeltsin resigned and named Putin acting president; Putin was elected in March 2000. Berezovsky, who was originally a supporter of Putin and was close to Yeltsin's inner circle, previously has floated the allegation that Russia's security services were involved in the bombing. Yesterday, he said he believes that Putin did not order the blasts, but "at a minimum, he knew, he was aware of the FSB's participation." The FSB is the Russian acronym for the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB, which Putin headed for a year before being named prime minister. Berezovsky, who left Russia and has been living and working in London in self-imposed exile, is co-chairman of a new party, Liberal Russia, which sponsored the news conference. Berezovsky said his goal is to call attention to the unanswered questions about the bombings. He brushed aside queries about his motives, saying he did not want to discuss them, but the high-profile news conference seemed to be a deliberate challenge to Putin. Berezovsky also made public a film about the bombings and provided new hints about the mysterious blasts, but no conclusive evidence. One piece of the material was a statement from Nikita Chekulin, a former acting director of a Russian scientific institute, who said he was recruited by the FSB to be part of an undercover anti-terrorist operation. He said he learned of a secret scheme to transfer tons of high explosives from military bases to unnamed organizations, and that the hexogen was shipped under false labels, suggesting the explosive material in the blasts came from the state, not the Chechens. Chekulin alleged that an attempt to investigate the transfers was stymied later by the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, who had succeeded Putin in the post. Previously, officials have said hexogen was used in the bombings. However, Chekulin's brief statement did not prove the connection. Likewise, the film, "Assassination of Russia," by two Frenchmen, Charles Gazelle and Jean-Charles Deniau, focused on the many mysteries about the bombings, but did not resolve them. |
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