Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [90]
The building was evacuated for the night and the bomb defused. The sacks were taken away by the FSB. Local law enforcement were put on full alert. Composite sketches of the terrorist suspects, two men and a woman, were distributed to two thousand policemen and shown on TV. By morning, news agencies boasted that a terrorist attack had been foiled in Ryazan. On the national evening news of September 23, Prime Minister Putin praised the vigilance of the Ryazanians and promised full victory in Chechnya.
The next morning brought a stunning shift. FSB Chief Nikolai Patrushev went on the air to announce that the Ryazan incident was in fact staged by his agency.
“This was not a bomb,” he declared. “The exercise may not have been carried out well, but it was only a test, and the so-called explosive was only sacks of sugar.”
In their reports a few months later, however, Englund, Reynolds, and Voloshin quoted tenants, the local police, and an explosives expert who contradicted Patrushev. They all believed everything was for real: the yellowish substance in the sacks wasn’t sugar, a gas analyzer used by the explosives team had detected RDX, an explosive, and the timer had used a live shotgun cartridge as a detonator.
Voloshin’s report challenged the FSB to produce evidence to back up its claim that it was just an exercise: the records, the participants, the sacks with sugar.
After Voloshin’s article there were more stories, suggesting possible explanations for why the FSB would make its bizarre claim. Some reports held that the men who planted the bomb, FSB agents all, were about to be arrested, so the Agency needed a cover story. Others claimed that they were in fact arrested, and then released after producing FSB badges. What was established beyond doubt was that late on the night of the incident, Nadezhda Yuhanova, a telephone exchange operator, overheard a suspicious conversation: “There are checkpoints everywhere; split up and leave the city one by one.” She alerted the police. They traced the call to Lubyanka, FSB headquarters in Moscow.
On March 13, a second story by Voloshin appeared in Novaya Gazeta. He reported an incident at the 137th Airborne Troop Regiment base near Ryazan one night in September. Pvt. Alexei Pinyaev and two of his comrades were on sentry duty guarding the ammunition depot. Perhaps out of curiosity, or to escape the freezing cold, they entered the warehouse and found a pile of ordinary sacks labeled “Sugar.” They cut a hole in one of the sacks, removed some of the white powder, and used it to sweeten some tea. The stuff turned their tea foul, not sweet. They called their commanding officer.
The officer had been trained in explosives. He determined that the powder was RDX. Bigwigs from the FSB arrived from Moscow. Everybody with knowledge of the episode was questioned and sworn to secrecy. Pinyaev and his friends were threatened with a court-martial for poking their nose into something that wasn’t their business. In the end all of them were transferred to Chechnya—but not before they talked to Voloshin.
On March 20, by a small margin, the Duma voted down a motion by Yuri Schekochihin to ask the prosecutor general’s office to look into the apartment bomb scare in Ryazan for possible violations of the law. By then the flagship NTV show Independent Investigations had taped an hour-long town hall discussion about the incident. Among the participants were Ryazanians from the Novoselova Street building, local policemen, explosives experts, and three representatives of the FSB. The verdict of the participants—with the exception of the FSB officers—was unanimous: the bomb was real.