On Sept. 1, 2004, the first day of the new school year, a group of militants seized school No. 1 in the small North Ossetian town of Beslan. Of the nearly 1,200 hostages, 332 were killed, 186 of them children.
To honor the memory of the dead — of the hostages, as well as 10 special forces soldiers who laid down their lives in the ensuing assault — the security services and, broadly speaking, the state, should have learned some sort of lesson in the six years since the tragedy.
Well, has any lesson been learned?
Society, or at least the part not indifferent to atrocity, insisted on getting answers to a few simple questions and seeing the officials whose negligence and mismanagement assisted the terrorists held accountable.
The answers provided by security services, courts and a parliamentary commission only heightened the confusion. They would have us believe that local foresters, residents and police were to blame for allowing the terrorists to quietly plan their atrocities in Ingushetia — a republic flooded with troops and law enforcement agents — and travel undetected to North Ossetia.
We are trying to find out what else has come to light in the years since this tragedy.