Cheers, Ken Hanly
Russian secret service points to possible culprit behind US tragedy ITAR-TASS
Moscow, 12 September: In the opinion of Russian secret services the Islamic fundamentalist organization Jaamat al-Islamie, [spelling as given in the original item; Arabic spelling would be Al-Jama'a al-Islamiya; listed in RIU files in Pakistan as Jamaat-i-Islami and in Afghanistan as Jamiat-e-Eslami] in view of its financial and organizational potentials, may be behind terrorist acts in the USA, experts of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) told TASS on Wednesday.
They stressed that the masterminding and sponsoring a chain of explosions of residential houses in Moscow and Volgodonsk two years ago had been traced to that radical group with the headquarters in Afghanistan and branches in the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Some 230 people were then killed by the explosions.
Comparing the terrorist acts in Moscow and in the United States, the FSB experts noted that alongside extreme cruelty both cases were clearly underlined by the attempt at intimidating the state and society by terrorists seeking to achieve their political ends.
Experts believe that the above-mentioned organization, because of its financial and organizational resources, is capable of preparing and staging the broadest and coordinated terrorist acts in any point on the globe.
It is characteristic that the possibility of such terrorist acts from the air was first publicly announced in 1996 by ideologist of Wahhabism in Chechnya, Movladi Udugov. He made threats to Moscow, saying that separatists will put a suicide terrorist on board an airliner and target it for the Kremlin.
Regarding the second anniversary of the explosions in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buynaksk, the tragic anniversary for Russia, the FSB experts stressed that all those implicated in the explosions had been identified. It was Wahhabi Achimez Gochiyayev who trained the terrorists and masterminded their actions in Russia on an order from Chechnya, from Arab terrorists Khattab and Abu Umar.
Gochiyayev's assistant Saitakov was eliminated by federal troops in Chechnya. The same fate befell Arab mercenary Abu Umar. There is information that Gochiyayev and his associate Krymshamkhalov are now hiding in the Pankisi gorge in Georgia. Those who set off an explosion in a residential house in Buynaksk have been arrested and convicted. Punishment will certainly be inflicted on all other criminals who are still at large, the FSB experts say.
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