BESLAN TERRORISTS 'WERE HIGH ON DRUGS'

Moscow - All the hostage-takers who seized Beslan's School No 1 on
September 1 were drug addicts and under the influence of narcotics
throughout the 52-hour siege, Russia's deputy Prosecutor General said
yesterday.

In a statement to the Interfax news agency, Nikolay Shepel said that
forensic tests on the extremists' corpses had shown that 22 of the 32
hostage-takers had been on hard drugs and had regularly injected
substances such as heroin and morphine, while the other 10 had been
using softer drugs.

His statement will satisfy many of the bereaved, who have long since
claimed that the extremists were "narkomany", or junkies.

Traces of narcotics left in the militants' lifeless bodies exceeded
normally lethal levels, Shepel added, indicating that they had been
long-term addicts and had been high while preparing the terrorist act
which ultimately claimed the lives of 344 people, more than half of
whom were children.

Their extreme brutality could also have been spurred on by the fact
that some of them had run out of drugs.

Shepel said: "Some of the criminals had run out of drugs and were
suffering from withdrawal symptoms which are usually accompanied by
aggressiveness and uncontrollable behaviour."

"These conclusions allow us to look at the situation from a new
angle."

His claims were backed up by Alexander Torshin, the chairman of the
parliamentary inquiry into the tragedy, who said that many of the
witnesses he and his colleagues had interviewed had said the same.

"The commission is determined to find out what was in these drugs
because, judging by eyewitness testimony - and we need to check this -
the terrorists had practically no pain threshold," he told Ekho Moskvy
radio station yesterday.

"They were able to take three bullets and continue to fight and showed
no signs of fatigue."

Extremists

Torshin added that the room where the hostage-takers had slept and fed
themselves had provided no supporting evidence and that only date
wrappers had been found there.

Noting that the extremists had drunk and eaten very little during the
siege, he said that they appeared to have been taking some kind of
"special" drugs to sharpen their eyesight - a crucial faculty for
snipers who kept Russian special forces at bay for hours. Some of the
extremists are also known to have listened to German hard rock group
Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy
and fired up.

Chechen extremists had used drugs before to keep their energy levels
high at crucial moments.

Many of the militants who seized a packed Moscow theatre in 2002 were
revealed to have been high: the authorities found syringes and
narcotics inside afterwards.

The Beslan parliamentary commission said it hoped to complete its work
within six months.

It is unclear how much of its findings will be made public.