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Beslan terrorists 'were high on drugs'
All the hostage-takers who seized Beslan's School No 1 on September 1 were drug addicts and under the influence of narcotics throughout the 52-hour siege, Russia's deputy Prosecutor General said on Sunday. In a statement to the Interfax news agency, Nikolay Shepel said that forensic tests on the extremists' corpses had shown that 22 of the 32 hostage-takers had been on hard drugs and had regularly injected substances such as heroin and morphine, while the other 10 had been using softer drugs.His statement will satisfy many of the bereaved, who have long since claimed that the extremists were "narkomany", or junkies. Traces of narcotics left in the militants' lifeless bodies exceeded normally lethal levels, Shepel added, indicating that they had been long-term addicts and had been high while preparing the terrorist act which ultimately claimed the lives of 344 people, more than half of whom were children. Their extreme brutality could also have been spurred on by the fact that some of them had run out of drugs. Shepel said: "Some of the criminals had run out of drugs and were suffering from withdrawal symptoms which are usually accompanied by aggressiveness and uncontrollable behaviour. These conclusions allow us to look at the situation from a new angle." Posted by: Mark Espinola 2004-10-18 |
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