RUSSIAN OFFICIAL SAYS BESLAN REBELS WERE ADDICTS

MOSCOW, Oct. 17 - Forensic analysis of the remains of 31 militants who
seized a public school in Beslan last month has determined that all of
them were dependent on drugs, a senior law enforcement official said
in a statement reported Sunday by Russian news agencies.

The official, Nikolai Shepel, the deputy prosecutor general of
Russia's southern federal district, also said blood tests had found
very high levels of heroin and morphine among a majority of the
attackers who died as the siege ended, "which indicates that they were
long-term drug addicts and had been using drugs permanently while
preparing for the terrorist attack," according to the Interfax wire
service.

"These conclusions help us look at the Beslan tragedy from a new
angle," he said.

The statement was not the first of its kind here. As terror attacks
have emanated in recent years from the war in Chechnya, many Russian
law enforcement officials and politicians have said those who plan the
attacks use hard drugs to coerce suicide bombers or to induce in the
bombers a semi-alert state that assists them in fulfilling their grim
assignments. Pro-separatist Web sites have dismissed the claims as
Russian propaganda.

In an interview last year with the newspaper Vremya Novostei, Akhmad
Kadyrov, who later became the president of Chechnya, said that suicide
bombers were people "filled with various psychotropic drugs." (Mr.
Kadyrov was assassinated in a bomb blast this year.)

Such claims have typically been used to explain the condition of
female bombers with tactically simple missions - carrying a bomb into
a crowd and depressing a button to detonate it - and not to describe
experienced guerrillas, who perform more complicated and long-running
tasks.

The hostage-takers in Beslan were said by survivors and Russian
authorities alike to have demonstrated proficiency in several military
skills, including scouting their target, swiftly rigging bombs into a
network that could be detonated electrically and organizing a defense
against assault. Mr. Shepel said Sunday that some of them were now
believed to have been suffering from withdrawal during the siege.

Further details of Mr. Shepel's statement and of the forensic analysis
behind it were not available on Sunday.