MOSCOW, Jan. 30 (UPI) -- Senior Russian officials may face prosecution for unwittingly assisting in the murders of 190 children, the Moscow Times said this weekend.
In all, Russian authorities have so far compiled a list of seven officials in Moscow and the North Caucasus who are believed to have aided the Chechen secessionist terrorists who seized 1,200 hostages in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia in early September and eventually murdered 344 of them including 190 children, the newspaper said. .
"Two accomplices have been detained, three others are on the list of the wanted persons, and we have passed materials about two more [to investigators]," said the head of the commission, Deputy Federation Council Speaker Alexander Torshin according to an Interfax news agency report. He said all of the suspects had ranks of lieutenant colonel or higher, the Moscow Times said.
Sen. Vladimir Kulakov, a member of the parliamentary commission said the officials were not suspected of being directly involved in the attack but rather of providing free passage for the terrorists. "Accomplices are not only those who fired machine guns. They are also those who got paid, who paid, and who let them through without noticing," the newspaper reported him as saying.
