#4
BBC Monitoring
Chechens welcome fugitive tycoon's words on Moscow,
Volgodonsk explosions
Source: Chechenpress web site, Tbilisi, in Russian 17 Dec 01
17 December, Chechenpress state news agency correspondent A. Khalidov: For four days now the Russian authorities have maintained a deathly silence regarding the serious charges the entrepreneur Boris Berezovskiy has levelled against the FSB [Federal Security Service], accusing them of blowing up houses in Moscow and Volgodonsk. We should recall that more than 300 people died at the time as a result of these terrorist acts, committed by criminals. The 300 included old people, women and children. As we know, the Kremlin authorities violated the principle of presumption of innocence in their haste to blame these monstrous crimes on Chechens. This was one of the pretexts for Russia's new military aggression against the Chechen state.
As a result of the fact that the Chechens were accused by the Russian authorities of preparing and carrying out these explosions, a thousand CRI [Chechen Republic of Ichkeria] citizens who temporarily found themselves on the territory of Russia were subjected to punitive repression. The Kremlin stubbornly tried to pin the blame for this crime against humanity carried out in these Russian towns on the Chechens, trying to represent this long-suffering people as a nation of potential criminals and terrorists. Individual attempts by a few honourable Russian politicians to express their objective view about the crimes committed were immediately silenced by the Russian special services.
Today, when the powerful Russian businessman and oligarch Boris Berezovskiy has openly accused the FSB of carrying out these explosions in Russian towns, the Kremlin's silence on this score looks like a sign of admission to these accusations. If things were otherwise, Russian politicians, who systematically speak out in the Russian media on even the most trivial of topics, would long ago have expressed their attitude towards such serious charges against the Kremlin authorities made by such a well-known Russian entrepreneur. For their part, the Chechens are hoping that the brave Russian politician Berezovskiy will manage to establish those truly responsible for this tragedy for Russian and Chechen citizens. [Chief spokesman for the Russian Federal Security Service Lt-Gen Aleksandr Zdanovich responded to Berezovskiy's accusations on 17 December, describing them as "nonsense and gibberish", Russian Interfax news agency reported.]
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