The Russian apartment bombings were a series of explosions that hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing 293 people and injuring 651. The explosions occurred in Buynaksk on 4 September, Moscow on 9 and 13 September, and Volgodonsk on 16 September. Several other bombs were defused in Moscow at the time.
A similar bomb was found and defused in the Russian city of Ryazan on 23 September 1999. On the next day Federal Security Service Director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the Ryazan incident had been a training exercise. This has led to the support of theories by Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya that the apartment bombings were carried out by the Russian secret service FSB (formerly KGB).
Together with the Invasion of Dagestan launched from Chechnya in August 1999 by Islamist militia led by Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab, the bombings caused the Russian Federation to launch the Second Chechen War.
Although on 2 September 1999, the militia commander Ibn Al-Khattab announced that "The mujahideen of Dagestan are going to carry out reprisals in various places across Russia," on 14 September he denied responsibility for the blasts, adding that he was fighting the Russian army, not women and children.
An official investigation of the bombings was completed by the Russian Federal Security Service in 2002. According to the investigation and the court ruling that followed, the bombings were organized by Achemez Gochiyaev, who remained at large as of 2010, and ordered by Ibn Al-Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif, who were later killed. Six other suspects have been convicted by Russian courts.
State Duma member Yuri Shchekochikhin filed two motions for a parliamentary investigation of the events, but the motions were rejected by the Duma in March 2000. An independent public commission to investigate the bombings was chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev. The commission was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. The Commission's lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested for exposing classified information.
Yury Felshtinsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky (oligarch in British exile), David Satter, Boris Kagarlitsky, Vladimir Pribylovsky, and the secessionist Chechen authorities claimed that the 1999 bombings were a false flag attack coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya, which boosted Prime Minister and former FSB Director Vladimir Putin's popularity, and brought the pro-war Unity Party to the State Duma and Putin to the presidency within a few months although there was little concrete evidence for these claims.
Gordon Bennett from Conflict Studies Research Centre, Robert Bruce Ware, Paul J. Murphy, Henry Plater-Zyberk, Simon Saradzhyan, Nabi Abdullaev and Richard Sakwa criticized the conspiracy theory, pointing out problems such as the lack of evidence.
Read more about Russian Apartment Bombings: Previous Threats and Bombings, Chronology of Events of June–October 1999
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