‘You are for some reason separating him from the rebels,’ remarked a prosecutor.
‘I am not separating him out because I want to defend him. I would never defend him, nowhere and never, after what happened. I am just saying what was. Anyone who was with us, Ganiyev, or Kodzoyev, they all could confirm that his wife did not wear the veil, and he was separate from the others,’ she said.
She herself condemned him for what had happened in the school, but the very words she used could not help but raise doubts about his guilt. This was particularly the case when she later described how she came back from her failed suicide mission to Mozdok.
‘I was categorically banned from speaking to his wife, or from telling him who I was or where they were taking me. They did not trust him. This I can say. And on the last day, when they took me to Moscow, his wife ran up to me. She was hysterical and said: “Zarema, where are they taking you? You should stay with us.” And when I told them where I was being taken, she was just in shock. I was completely banned from talking to him or his wife.’
It was impossible to conclude from the evidence of these two Chechen witnesses that Kulayev and his brother had ‘both been members of an armed group headed by Shamil Basayev’, as the judge had done. The judge clearly did not listen to their evidence very closely, but how exactly did the two Chechens’ words tie in with Kulayev’s own account? And what did he mean, when he said he was just there ‘because of his brother’? That was a story he told on the first day of the trial.
He had, he said, moved in with his brother in 2003, because his brother had lost an arm in an explosion, and needed help to repair his house. On 31 August 2004 – the day before the attack on the school – he had left the house to go a shop, and he had been picked up by a group of rebels.
‘They picked me up. Because of my brother. They asked about my brother. “Your brother, where does he live? We have looked for him two or three days”,’ said Kulayev, speaking in the short sentences used by Chechens who do not speak Russian well.
‘Then I went home and told my brother, some, some person has come for you, you should go to this place to see him.’
His brother went out for twenty minutes, came back, then took Kulayev and an eighteen-year-old friend called Islam out with him. They all went together to a rebel base, just outside the village of Sagopshi. His brother argued with the rebels. It transpired they were suspicious that he had been allowed out of detention, where he had been kept for four or five months, and not charged. They thought he might have agreed to work for the Russians in exchange for his freedom. Kulayev and his friend Islam were left to sit around with nothing to do.
‘They said to me and Islam, make something to eat. They said, you will sit here, until someone says what to do,’ he said. His brother continued to argue with the group of armed men, of whom there were about eighteen. Two Ossetian men, one of whom had long hair, took Kulayev aside, and began to demand to know if he or his brother was working for the Russians.
‘They said, we will cut you up anyway, tell the truth. I said, I have nothing to say, my brother is not working. Then this Ossetian and another one brought Islam. They said, wait, dig yourself a grave and then let’s see. They gave us spades. Dig yourself graves, they said.’
That proved to be an empty threat, but it was enough to terrify Kulayev. His brother went up to him and said he was not being allowed to go home, since he had seen the rebels’ base. His brother then went on to say they had somewhere to go that evening, and that Kulayev and Islam would be dropped off by the side of the road somewhere.
That evening, they were loaded onto the truck and driven overnight to Beslan. The two young men were the last to get out of the cab of the truck. By the time they had done so, children and adults were being driven screaming into the sports hall.
By his own account, he walked into the hall where the hostages were being gathered and stood there for just a few minutes. He was then placed in the cafeteria with Islam and remained there for almost the entire time of the siege. He was given a rifle only after the school had been seized. One of the guerrillas had been killed, and he said the leader of the group – whom he called the Colonel – gave it to him and told him to look after it.
For three days, he said he sat there with nothing to do or to eat, except for a Snickers chocolate bar. When the storm operation started, a tank began to shoot at his side of the building, and the grill over the window was ripped off. He jumped out of the window, so as to tell the soldiers not to shoot.
‘I said, don’t shoot, there are people, there are no rebels there. They detained me at once, they did not let me talk more. They took me somewhere. In some basement they began to interrogate me.’
And that, improbably enough, was his story. He enraged the prosecutors, who demanded that he recognize his guilt, but he continued to insist that he did not know Basayev, that he did not have a gun, that he had never fired at the hostages, that he had never killed anyone, that he did not take part in planning the raid, and that he was not guilty.
‘We will assess your action. We need you to understand. We need you to know, you to say, what happened. That you were in an armed group, which attacked a school. That you held weapons in your hands, that there was an attack on policemen, on special forces. That this Colonel gave you orders. I am explaining it to you simply, what is not clear? And the next article, the taking of hostages. Did you take hostages? Did you gather them, and not let them go? Here is another point, article 206, 105, where you say you did not kill. Then how did it happen, that 330 people died in this tragedy?’ demanded a prosecutor.
‘I did not kill anyone,’ replied Kulayev. ‘I know that more than 300 people were killed. I understand these people. I have never killed anyone in my life. I have never taken part in anything, not in terrorist acts, nowhere. Is there just one bit of evidence that I was in a band or was seen with someone? I did not do this. How can I say that I did all this? I will accept responsibility for everything if there is just one bit of evidence that I was in a band. The only thing was we were taken to Beslan, forced to. If I knew where we were going, they could not have taken me there.’
And, by the end of the cross-examinations, they had failed to force him to admit to anything. And the extraordinary thing was that in the whole course of the case, he never did. Because of the strange format of the court, he was permanently being asked the same questions: why did he kill the children? How could he do such a thing? The questioners were people with anger and moral authority that it is hard to imagine, but he never once changed his story.
Even the way he carried himself seemed strange. He did not have the certainty of a committed rebel fighter, like Ganiyev, for example, who was combative when he talked to the prosecutors and arrogant in his answers.
Kulayev, who stood to hear the charges against him although he did not have to, always said that he was sorry for the bereaved relatives, and that he would never have allowed himself to be taken to the school had he known what was about to happen.
‘Kulayev, all this evil happened with your participation,’ said a prosecutor at one point.
‘I know this,’ he replied.
‘That is why I ask. How do you relate to these actions? Now, before these victims, looking them in the eyes.’
‘I cannot even raise my eyes towards them,’ he said.
Again and again, he came back to the point that he would never have harmed children.
‘I am sad for them, of course. A child is a child. To any Muslim, and I am a Muslim, of course I am sad for them. But what could I have done? A child before the age of seven is considered an angel, I know. I could not even raise my hand to a child, even if he was killing me,’ he told one woman questioning him.
So how can we understand this? Was he just defending himself by a long and improbable lie? Was he so soul-less that he was prepared to not only kill children for a political cause, but also then lie about it?
Perhaps he was not lying at all, and it certainly
looked that way from the testimony of Alik Tsagonov, one of the few hostages to have a clear recollection of Kulayev in the school. Tsagonov was forced into the cafeteria after the explosions that triggered the Russian assault to free the school. A group of hostages were made to sit on the floor while the rebels fired out of the windows over their heads. He admitted that he did not remember everything clearly, but he was certain that Kulayev was sitting among the hostages, not battling the army like the rest of the rebels.
‘I did not see that he had weapons at that moment. When he sat among us, he had nothing in his hands. When he spoke, we understood that he was one of them. Sveta Bigaeva sat near us, she said to me: “He is reacting to what we are saying.” And we were talking in Ossetian. I asked him: “Do you understand Ossetian?” He said to me: “I understand a little.” These were the words that he said first: “I killed no one. I want to live”,’ the witness said.
Kulayev later had the chance to cross-examine the witness himself, and asked him if he remembered a fifteen-minute conversation they had about a man in Chechnya who might have been a mutual friend.
‘Tell me, when I sat with you, do you remember how I told you how we were brought there, taken from our home? I explained to you. I of course could not speak well in Russian. Do you remember this?’ Kulayev asked. He was talking to a man who had no cause to like him, or to defend him, but the witness backed him up.
‘He said this as well. He said he was forced, that he did not want to go. But, how it was, it could not all be saved in my head. All his words,’ Tsagonov said.
‘Well, I said to you, when they started to fire from the tanks. Do you remember, I said, they will now shoot the ground and first floors. And then they will start shooting here. Therefore, whoever of us, let them jump out now. And then you said to me: “You jump out, and tell them there are children here.” And then, when they fired from the tanks, when you said, there were explosions on the first floor, and the cage [from the window] fell. A rebel shot one lad, a child. And you said to me: “Jump out.” And I jumped out,’ said Kulayev, desperate to have his story at least a little confirmed.
The witness could not in fact support everything that Kulayev said, saying he could not remember, but he did say that Kulayev had been the second person to jump out of the window.
Other witnesses had vague memories of Kulayev running around with a gun, and terrorizing them, but Tsagonov’s account is far more detailed, and at least raises doubts whether the defendant was the dedicated jihadi depicted in the charge sheet.
Be that as it may, the judge rejected Tsagonov’s testimony in favour of the more numerous, but less specific, evidence of people who said they saw Kulayev in camouflage clothes shooting uncontrollably with an automatic rifle. (Kulayev himself insisted he was wearing the white clothes and trainers that he left his house in, and did not shoot at anyone.)
In his final summing up, the judge rejected also Kulayev’s own testimony, and the elaborate story about his brother. The judge compared Kulayev’s words to statements the defendant made in detention prior to the court hearing. In those statements, which bore the defendant’s signature, Kulayev admitted many of the charges against him, including that of being part of an armed group.
But, taking into account Kulayev’s own cross-examination, those documents themselves seem doubtful.
‘Did you read them before you signed,’ asked one of the lawyers.
‘I did not read.’
‘Why did you not read?’
‘I do not know the Russian language,’ replied Kulayev.
‘From the moment of your detention, you were offered a lawyer. Were you always interrogated in the presence of a lawyer?’
‘No, he was only there three times in five months, I think,’ said Kulayev.
‘But now you are being questioned in the presence of your lawyer. You and your lawyer sign the documents, after they have been read by you personally, and you write that you personally read it at the end of the document. What can you say now?’
‘In these months, I only saw my lawyer twice. Where they told me to sign, I signed.’
The judge ignored this testimony, instead using the circular argument that Kulayev must have voluntarily signed the documents – documents the defendant said he had not read, or agreed to, and only signed because he was beaten – since he had also signed a statement declaring he had voluntarily signed the documents.
So, that was the judge’s argument. The testimony of the two Chechen witnesses was rewritten to support the prosecution case. Kulayev’s own testimony was rejected in favour of earlier testimony that the defendant said had been beaten out of him. And testimony by hostages that could have been used to support Kulayev was ignored.
It was hardly a model trial, but that was no surprise. Trials in Russia rarely are. But the most important thing is: was Kulayev really guilty? Just because the trial was a farce, does that mean he was not guilty?
And here, obviously, it is harder to judge without spending months traipsing from house to house in Chechnya and Beslan compiling information about a convicted terrorist who has already failed his appeal. This is not a job for the faint-hearted, since it would attract police interest within minutes, and I confess it is one I am not brave enough to undertake.
And yet to my mind, his story that he shot no one in the school makes sense, if only because of the vagueness of the testimony against him and the consistency of his denial of having done any of it. His story somehow seems too unlikely not to be true. True jihadis boasted about what they had done, or tried to justify it. They did not flatly deny it.
And what about the beginning? Is it really possible that he had been picked up by rebels and forced to go with them just because his brother was suspected of having changed sides and gone over to the Russians? And here, there are problems, since, frankly, the story does not make much sense.
Why would the rebels who took his brother take him too? What did it matter to them that he came with them? This is the only bit of the story that does not seem logically coherent.
And this is where the chaotic, disorganized and biased nature of the trial is most frustrating, because on three occasions he gave out hints – or even firm comments – that there was more to it than he had at first said. If only more-insistent lawyers had been present, they would have followed up on what he said in passing.
Questioned as he was by non-skilful interrogators who did not in any case care very much, crucial hints were missed that could have explained why he was taken to the school in the first place. And once you see the hints, his whole story makes sense.
The first time he dropped one of his hints was right at the beginning, during his own lawyer’s cross-examination of him. If he had had a competent lawyer – or perhaps a lawyer who wanted to defend him – it is surely impossible that what he said could have been missed.
When the rebels first picked him up, when he was on his way to the shop, and said they were looking for his brother, they took Kulayev ‘away somewhere’, he had said. While there they asked him about his brother, but they also asked him if he worked for Ramzan Kadyrov, a rebel who changed sides to succeed his father as the Kremlin-backed president of the region.
‘Do you work for Ramzan Kadyrov? I have documents. They took them off me, questioned me. Then they said to me, let your brother, let him come, we will wait for him where the roads cross,’ Kulayev said.
It is hard to figure out exactly what he meant in those comments, since his Russian grammar is so mangled it could be several different things, but it looks very likely that he had some kind of documents, which fingered him as being in the employ of Ramzan Kadyrov, the sworn enemy of Shamil Basayev and the separatist rebels. Kadyrov – and another group of Chechens from the Yamadayev family – was the prop of Russia’s control of Chechnya, and was hated by the rebels. If Kulayev had been working for him, they would have taken him away immediately and punished him as a traitor.
Kulayev let slip the next clue when Ganiy
ev was on the witness stand. Although Ganiyev was technically the one giving evidence, the complexity of the trial structure meant that Kulayev regularly spoke as well. At one point, he yet again insisted that he had nothing to do with the raid, and that he had been taken along against his will.
‘What, you were taken as a translator?’ asked the judge with heavy sarcasm, in light of Kulayev’s bad Russian.
‘No, I was taken, I said, because of my brother. I had been with Yamadayev, I had my documents with me. Later also the Kadyrov documents. Because of this they did not let me go. I was for three months a guard for Yamadayev, the general. When my brother was with Basayev, I was with him [Yamadayev] there. Because of this they brought me here,’ he said.
This time, his story is far clearer. He had been initially picked up by rebels looking for his brother, but when they searched him they found the documents incriminating him as a foot-soldier for the other side and took him with them.
The final and most convincing clue came from the other Chechen witness: from the failed suicide bomber Muzhakhoyeva. She was cross-examined by the prosecutors, and the defence lawyer, and the judge, and the defendant, but it took someone with more presence than any of them to get to the bottom of the case.
Susanna Dudiyeva, who led the Beslan Mothers group, appears to have been the only participant to have picked up on Kulayev’s remarks that he had worked for the pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya, and she asked Muzhakhoyeva about it.
‘Nurpashi said that he was part of the guard of Kadyrov. He could be killed for this. And for this, he was taken there, to the terrorist act. Does this mean that Ganiyev and the others knew that he had joined Kadyrov’s forces?’ asked Dudiyeva, who is remarkably articulate and intelligent.
‘You know,’ replied Muzhakhoyeva, ‘I have not said this before. But his wife told me all about this. And I told her: “Take your husband and leave.” Because he had already been there [with Kadyrov], sooner or later they would either kill him or send him somewhere.’
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