Investigator says Beslan gunmen were using unknown drug

RUSSIA: The gunmen who carried out the bloody school siege in Beslan last month were drug addicts fortified by an unknown and highly-potent narcotic, according to the head of the commission investigating the attack.

Russia's prosecutor general's office claimed this week that post-mortem results showed that the rebels were addicted to heroin and morphine, and had run out of the drugs before the chaotic end to the siege, prompting withdrawal symptoms often "accompanied by aggressive and inappropriate behaviour".

However Mr Alexander Torshin, who leads the parliamentary group investigating how the attackers infiltrated North Ossetia from neighbouring Ingushetia and Chechnya and how more than 330 people died in the chaotic climax to the siege, said he had other suspicions.

"That answer does not entirely satisfy me. It seems to me that something brand new was being tested there, something to remove the pain threshold, make them hardy as horses and enable them to shoot very accurately."

Mr Boris Kalachev, an Interior Ministry drugs expert, said the 30 or so hostage-takers could have been using phencycline, also known as PCP or "angel dust".

"This illegal substance sharply increases a person's physical and psychological activity; his body does not feel pain," Mr Kalachev said.

He added that the gunmen could have made the substance themselves in the largely lawless North Caucasus region.

Liberal critics accuse the government of trying to absolve officials and the security services of all blame for allowing the separatist guerrillas to reach Beslan, and for letting the siege degenerate into a wild gunfight involving rebels, police, soldiers and dozens of armed civilians.

They also suggest that allegations of drug-use among the Chechen and Ingush guerrillas might be intended to discredit them in the eyes of supporters in their mostly-Muslim homelands, where drink and drugs are frowned upon.

After Chechen rebels died along with more than 120 hostages in the Moscow theatre siege in 2002, state television showed bottles of alcohol and syringes lined up behind their bodies.

An official in the forensic department of the North Ossetian police was quoted this week as saying there was no proof of drug-use among the militants in Beslan. "There were no syringes, ampoules, and their wrists were without scars. There may have been some drug addicts among them, but to say they were all drug addicts is too much."