Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [33]
There follows a description of how all this baggage was casually loaded by Maskhadov and his bodyguards into the boot of the car and the back seat, and they headed off towards Tolstoy-Yurt. Through all the checkpoints, through localities riddled with nocturnal secrets and patrols. Avtury, where Maskhadov and his two bodyguards were standing at a bus stop, is completely under the control of one of the regiments of the Interior Ministry’s troops, and there are legions of Kadyrovites there around the clock. Or at least, that is what the Kadyrovites claim. These details give support, if only indirectly, to the belief that in November 2004 no order had been issued to kill or even arrest Maskhadov. In late February 2005, however, it was.
Even more startling is the testimony regarding Basayev’s trip to Tolstoy-Yurt to meet Maskhadov: “Halfway to Farm No. 4 (again, in closely monitored Avtury) there was a vehicle. Some 200 metres before we reached it, the vehicle drove off and we approached Shamil Basayev. He was alone. Shamil Basayev had a plastic sack and a large sports bag. He was armed with a rifle. When I asked him what he had in the sack, he replied, ‘a sleeping bag.’ ”
If Maskhadov’s voice may not, in fact, be known to the whole world, Basayev’s face is surely familiar by now to everybody on the planet. Here he was, standing at a bus stop, completely alone, with no mask, carrying a rifle and a sleeping bag.
Let us recall the official version of why Basayev supposedly could not be caught. He was said to be hiding all the time in the mountain forests, lurking in a network of caves, and if he moved he was invariably surrounded by a host of men armed to the teeth, so that to capture him would cost too many of “our” lives. Does that mean that as of this date there were no orders for Basayev’s arrest? We have no answer to that question.
Maskhadov spent almost four months in Tolstoy-Yurt, hemmed in virtually the whole time, at first in the old adobe house, but then from the end of December he and his bodyguards went down to the cellar. The case materials give its dimensions as 2 × 2 × 2 metres. A cramped vault.
From the testimony of one of the witnesses: “They only came out of the cellar to pray namaz, at dawn and in the evening. Aslan Maskhadov, Vakhid and Viskhan (Murdashiev and Khadzhimuratov) had three computers which opened like a book, and two video cameras. Maskhadov spent practically the whole day at his computer. They sometimes videoed themselves with the cameras. In approximately early February 2005, a man who appeared to be about 40 years old came to the house. He had a short beard and was wearing civilian clothes. In conversation with Maskhadov they called this man Abdul Khalim (Sadulayev, Maskhadov’s successor. He just walked in, and equally easily left).
“On March 8, at about 9:00 a.m. armed men ran into the courtyard of No. 2 Suvorov Street shouting ‘Come out one by one with your hands up!’ They asked Musa Yusupov whether his house had cellars. ‘I showed them the cellar area beneath my new house. Then they started conducting a search and in the old house found the entrance to the cellar in which Aslan Maskhadov, Vakhid and Viskhan were living. The soldiers blew up the entrance to the cellar and after that one of them shouted, ‘I can see a body.’ They shouted through the opening they had made to ask if anybody was alive in the cellar, and shortly afterwards took Vakhid and then Viskhan out of the old house.”
At the moment the entrance to the cellar was blown up, according to the case materials, Maskhadov was closest to it and took the full force of the blast. That is why he died instantly. His bodyguards survived only because Maskhadov died.
Do you remember the television images of the dead Maskhadov, stripped to the waist, lying on concrete in a courtyard? That