Press release, September 2, 2013

In the evening of September 1, the schooling day in Russia, activists of St.Petersburg YABLOKO held an action in the centre of the city in memory of the hostages – children and grownups – killed in School No 1in Beslan, North Ossetia.

On September 1, 2004, terrorists seized pupils and teachers of School No 1 in Beslan during the ceremony devoted to the beginning of a school year. For two and a half days militants held over 1,100 hostages in the school building. During the storm 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children, over 800 people were injured.

“Nine years ago, the Beslan tragedy occurred. We must not forget it!” ran placards of YABLOKO’s picketers.

“Recollecting those days , I feel pain and confusion,” said Nadezhda Chernavina, YABLOKO member. “How could it happen that well-armed gunmen managed to simply drive to the city center? How did they manage to keep people in the school for a few days? We did not understand how this could be happening and where all our intelligence services and police were,” she added.

“The tragedy in Beslan reflected all the problems of our time and our government,” said Andrei Tsirkunov, Council member of St. Petersburg YABLOKO. “It was a terrible cocktail mixed of terrorism, corruption, criminal negligence of the authorities and their lies! The worst thing was that literally over three hundred lives, most of them children, were burnt in this cocktail,” he noted.

YABLOKO called for resuming of investigation into the tragedy in Beslan.

“A special [parliamentary] commission on Beslan, the so-called Torshin’s Commission, could not or did not want to answer several key questions about those terrible days. Who let the militants into the city? Who was hiding the true number of hostages? Who was responsible for the explosion in the school building? Everything [the explosion and a huge number of victims] that resulted from the storm [of the police and the intelligence] requires an objective and impartial investigation,” said Andrei Tsirkunov.

“However, instead of an objective investigation the authorities preferred to use this tragedy for curbing of human rights – abolishing of gubernatorial elections, silencing of the press and installing fear in the society,” Tsirkunov added.

Police did not interfere this time and YABLOKO’s action ended without arrests.