On October 31, I received a telephone call from one of his readers, Professor A. Heyndrickx, director of International Reference Laboratories in Ghent, Belgium, a specialist on toxicology and a UN expert commissioned to examine the remains of victims of Yugoslav war crimes in Kosovo.... MORE

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... MORE

On October 31, representatives of the Russian special services and the Russian Procuracy presented to the press their version of what had happened at the theater center at Dubrovka. "A representative of the FSB confirmed the version that the terrorists did in fact have enough... MORE

The terrorists," correspondent Ol'ga Allenova hypothesized in the October 28 issue of Kommersant Vlast, "did not intend to die. Otherwise there would have been absolutely no reason for them to wear masks. They were waiting for something to happen." Three correspondents wrote in the October... MORE

As part of its attempt to reconstruct what had happened during the storming, the website Gazeta.ru interviewed one of the actors who participated in the musical after he had been released from the hospital. The actor drew attention to a key announcement made by the... MORE

In a similar vein, Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former senior officer of the FSB now living in London, said during an October 29 interview with Radio Liberty's Russian Service: "About fifty persons, a majority of whom were dressed in camouflage uniforms, penetrated to the center of... MORE

During the past week, several items have appeared on pro-regime websites suggesting that a significant percentage, perhaps even a half, of the terrorists who seized the theater were foreigners (with the implication being that they were Arabs). However, in an interview with the newspaper Kommersant... MORE

Writing in the October 31 issue of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, well-known journalist Sanobar Shermatova wrote, inter alia, on the subject of Movsar Baraev and of his late uncle, the notorious Chechen Wahhabi warlord Arbi Baraev: "An investigation carried out by this... MORE

During the charged period of October 25-28, the polling organization The All Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) asked a nationwide sample a question it has been repeatedly posing since January 2000: "Do you consider that it is necessary to continue the... MORE

On October 29, Agence France Presse, reporting from the White House in Washington DC, wrote that Ari Fleischer, official spokesman for President George W. Bush, had emphasized that the American president wanted a "political dialogue" to end the conflict in Chechnya but worried that global... MORE