Beslan Siege Plotter Will Be Tried, Vows Chechen Leader

The Chechen separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, tried to distance himself from extremists in the independence movement yesterday by declaring that his former commander-in-chief Shamil Basayev would one day stand trial for ordering the Beslan school siege.

The Kremlin has said that both Mr Maskhadov and Mr Basayev ordered the siege, in which more than 300 people, half of them children, were killed.

It has put £5.5m bounties on their heads.

But while Mr Basayev has claimed responsibility for the attack, Mr Maskhadov has condemned it and promised yesterday to punish those behind such "illegal acts".

In a statement on the website chechenpress.com, Mr Maskhadov again condemned the siege.

"Unfortunately in the condi tions of the current ongoing war, the trial of those responsible for the recent terrorist acts is practically impossible," he said.

"At the same time I declare that at the end of the military phase the guilty will be taken to court, including Shamil Basayev."

Mr Maskhadov has long struggled to rein in Mr Basayev; he reportedly made him his commander-in-chief in August 2002 to quieten the resistance before peace talks.

Yet since the Moscow theatre siege in October of that year, Mr Basayev has taken the lead in organising attacks against Russian civilians.

Reports surfaced yesterday of heightened militant resistance in Chechnya.

Russia's counter-terrorism headquarters in the Chechen republic said yesterday that both men had been involved in planning the Beslan atrocity.

Mr Basayev and his Arab mercenaries, they said, were
hiding behind Mr Maskha-dov's independence movement to legitimise their plan of creating an "Arab caliphate in the north Caucasus".

The claims came as the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called on the UN in New York to create a new list of terrorists and their supporters to simplify extradition and asset-freezing procedures.

An official from the FSB, the Russian security services, said the list would probably contain the names of Akhmed Zakayev, Mr Maskhadov's spokesman, who was granted political asylum by the UK and lives in London.

The former Chechen foreign minister Ilyas Akhmadov, who was given asylum by the US,
and Mr Maskhadov would also be on it, said the official.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, appealed to the media yesterday to modify their coverage of terrorist attacks, while apparently rejecting the idea of government restrictions.

He told a conference of news agencies: "It is obvious that the struggle against terrorism cannot be an excuse to infringe upon the freedom and independence of the press.

"But you yourselves, as professionals, should develop a model of work that would allow media to become an effective instrument in the struggle against terror."

The Russian parliament rejected a bill to ban all television and radio coverage of hostages crises until they had been resolved.

Some MPs argued that media coverage had helped terrorists by conveying the horror of their actions.