The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks

by Edward Mickolus

  The crashes occurred four days before an election to choose a Chechen president. Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov’s London representative, Akhmed Zakayev, denied involvement.

  At 9:30 P.M., Sebir flight 1047, a TU-154 carrying 38 passengers and 8 crew, left Moscow for Sochi. It disappeared from radar at 11:00 P.M. The pilot activated a distress and hijack signal. Four hours later, investigators found the debris 82 miles north of Rostov-on-Don.

  At 10:00 P.M., Volga-Avia Express flight 1303, a Tupolev TU-134, took off from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport heading for Volgograd (former Stalingrad) with 36 passengers and 8 crew, including the chief of the airline. It disappeared from radar at 10:56 P.M. Witnesses in Tula said they saw an explosion before the plane hit the ground near Buchalki village.

  On August 27, 2004, authorities announced that investigators had discovered traces of hexogen explosives (also known as RDX or clyclonite) in the wreckage of the TU-154 that crashed near Rostov-on-Don. The next day, investigators reported finding RDX traces on the TU134 that crashed in the Tula region south of Moscow. Police believed two Chechen women bought tickets at the last minute to board the two planes at Moscow’s airport. They were the only people whose family members did not inquire about the bodies.

  Investigators reported on August 31, 2004, that two Chechen women had accompanied the suspected bombers to Moscow in the days before the crashes. The duo remained at large in Moscow.

  On September 17, 2004, Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, 39, took credit on Kavkaz-Center, an Islamic website based in Lithuania.

  Investigators said that a Chechen woman bribed an airline ticket agent with 1,000 rubles ($34) to put her on a different flight; the agent scrawled, “Admit on board flight 1047.” The two women paid 5,000 rubles to a black market dealer for tickets for the flights. They had initially been stopped by police but were inexplicably let go. They were identified as Satsita Dzhebirkhanova and Aminat Nagayeva, although some Russian newspapers said that the passports were faked.

  On September 24, 2004, police Captain Mikhail Artamonov was charged with negligence that led to fatalities. Airline employee Nikolai Korenkov and accused ticket scalper Armen Arutyunian were charged with complicity in terrorism. On April 12, 2005, a Moscow regional court charged the latter two with aiding and abetting terrorism and commercial bribery. On June 30, 2005, Artamonov was sentenced to seven years for negligence.

  September 1, 2004

  Russia Beslan School Takeover

  Overview: Chechen terrorists’ preference for large-group attacks and the holding of large groups of hostages was seen two years earlier with the takeover of a Moscow theater. The organization, with other ethnic groups joining them, increased the pressure on the government and the public by taking over an elementary school on the first day of classes.

  Incident: On September 1, 2004, at 9:00 A.M., 32 terrorists, including Chechens, Kazakhs, Russians, Ingush, Ossetians, and at least 10 Arabs, drove up in a military-style GAZ-66 truck and shot their way into School No. 1 in Beslan in North Ossetia, Russia, near Chechnya, during the morning and took 1,200 people, including hundreds of students and parents, hostage on the first day of school. At least 11 adults died in the initial shootout with the terrorists, who were wearing camouflage. At least two female terrorists wore explosive belts. The terrorists set up a pedal mechanism to an explosive and threatened to blow up the school if rescuers attacked them and said they would kill 50 hostages for every kidnapper killed, 20 for each wounded.

  The school had been defended by only three security guards; one was killed and the two others were injured in the initial shootout.

  By mid-afternoon, 15 children, who were hidden in the boiler room by their English teacher, ran to safety. The terrorists had attempted to open the heavy iron door with two grenades, with no success.

  The hostage-takers demanded the release of 30 Chechen prisoners and Russian withdrawal from Chechnya. By phone, the terrorists asked to talk to the presidents of Ingushetia and North Ossetia.

  The terrorists initially refused to permit medicine, food, and drink to be brought in for the hostages. By the third day, the tap water was running short, and some children drank urine. Many of the children stripped to their underwear to try to escape the suffocating heat in the school. The terrorists also rejected safe passage.

  Some of the hostages later said that the terrorists were Wahhabis, wearing long beards and prayer caps.

  Hundreds of Russian troops surrounded the school with armored vehicles. The perimeter broke down, however, and numerous armed townspeople joined the siege. In the afternoon of September 2, 2004, the terrorists fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), setting a car alight. They again fired RPGs the evening of September 3, 2004, injuring a police officer.

  A local legislator said on September 2, 2004, at 9:00 P.M. that 20 male hostages had been executed inside the school. The male hostages had been herded to a different location, away from the children and women, and shot. One man had been executed an hour into the siege.

  On September 3, 2004, the terrorists freed 26 young children and their mothers. Gunfire was often heard coming from inside the school. Talks were suspended. Freed hostages said the terrorists had mined the school and suspended 16–18 bombs from the ceiling of the gymnasium, where many of the hostages were herded.

  The terrorists used gas masks to ensure that if would-be rescuers flooded the area with knockout gas, as had been done in the 2002 Moscow theater siege, they would not be affected.

  On September 4, 2004, around 1:00 P.M., the 52-hour siege ended when troops rushed the school after hearing explosions in the gym. The troops had not planned on rushing the school, but had no choice when the terrorists opened fire on fleeing children. At least 338 hostages, including 156 children; 10 Russian Special Forces rescuers; and 30 terrorists died from gunshot wounds, fire from the explosions, shrapnel, and the collapsing roof of the gymnasium.

  More than 1 percent of Beslan’s population was killed.

  Itar-TASS reported that the attack was financed by Abu Omar as-Seyf, an Arab alleged to represent al Qaeda in Chechnya, and directed by Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev. An escaped hostage said she recognized some of the terrorists as having earlier done construction work on the school, leading investigators to suggest that they had hidden their weapons in the school during construction.

  A Muslim group claiming loyalty to Ayman al-Zawahiri claimed credit on a website.

  On September 5, 2004, the Russian government announced on state television that it had lied to the public about the scale of the hostage crisis. The broadcast made no apology that the government had claimed that only 354 hostages were inside the school. Questions remained about how many terrorists there were (reports varied from 16 to 40); how many terrorists were alive, free, or captured; how many people died; and how many had been captive. Many believed the death toll was higher than the official figure of 338. (On September 6, 2004, the government dropped the number to 334, including 156 children, and said that 1,180 hostages were involved.)

  A captured terrorist identified as Nur-Pashi Kulayev was put on Russian state television on September 6, 2004. He was injured and had trouble talking, but said that “we gathered in the forest and the Colonel—it’s his nickname—and they said we must seize the school in Beslan.” He credited Basayev with giving the orders. He noted that another Chechen commander, Aslan Maskhadov, also gave orders. His group included Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, and people of other nationalities. “When we asked the Colonel why we must do it, he said, ‘Because we need to start war in the entire territory of the North Caucasus.’ ” Many of the school terrorists had also taken part in the June raids in Ingushetia that killed 90 people. The Washington Post reported that a Western intelligence service indicated that some of the terrorists came from Jordan and Syria.

  Authorities detained relatives of Basayev and Maskhadov on the second day of the siege.

  Russian authorities said that surveillance tape of the terrorists ind
icated that they had argued among themselves as to whether to escape or continue the siege. The group was led by four men and took phoned orders from Chechen commander Basayev. The leaders included a Chechen, a Russian, an Ingush, and an Ossetian, and were identified by their code names of Abdullah, Fantomas, The Colonel, and Magas.

  Fantomas was a bodyguard of Basayev.

  Abdullah (aka Vladimir Khodoyev, variant Khodov), had fought alongside Basayev earlier. He had upbraided the other gunmen when they permitted hostages to take a drink of water late in the takeover.

  The Colonel was often in the gym and was believed by the survivors to be a Russian.

  Magas (aka Ali Taziyev), 30, was a former police officer who disappeared on October 10, 1998, while working as a guard for a local official, according to press accounts. He and another police officer were guarding the official’s wife in a market when Chechens kidnapped the trio. She was ransomed in late 1999. The other officer’s body was found in 2000. Magas joined the terrorists and led an attack in Ingushetia in June. Some authorities believed he had staged the kidnapping and had joined the terrorists earlier. He became head of the Ingush Jamaat, a group allied with the Chechens. He led the June raids in Ingushetia, killing dozens of prosecutors and policemen. Magas is a common name, first heard in the terrorist milieu in the April 2004 assassination attempt against Ingushetian president Murat Zyazikov. Police initially believed he was Magomed Yevloyev. A man by that name was killed in Malgobek, but it was later determined that he was an unrelated murder suspect. Another Magomed Yevloyev was killed in Galashki, but he also was not the right Magas.

  All four leaders were killed in the gun battle.

  The terrorists videotaped the siege; the tape was shown on Russian television on September 7, 2004, and picked up around the world. Authorities also reported that they had tapped into a walkie-talkie call from a terrorist. President Putin reported, “One asks, ‘What’s happening? I hear noise,’ and the other says, ‘It’s okay, I’m in the middle of shooting some kids. There’s nothing to do.’ They were bored, so they shot kids. What kind of freedom fighters are these?” Russian demanded the extradition from the United Kingdom of Zakayev and other Chechen separatists who had been given political asylum.

  Security services reported on September 8, 2004, that the terrorist leader shot one of his own men who did not want to take children hostage, then blew up the two women by flipping the electronic control on their detonators. Police also said they had been aided by a local police officer. Authorities said the gym explosion had been an accident when the terrorists were trying to rearrange the explosives. The Kremlin also backtracked on saying that 10 Arabs were involved but continued to claim that a multinational group of extremists was involved. Moscow offered a $10 million reward for the capture or killing of Basayev and Maskhadov. The next day, Chechen rebel websites offered a $20 million bounty for President Putin’s capture.

  By September 9, 2004, Russian officials had identified six Chechens and four Ingush as involved in the attack squad. Bomb techs defused 127 homemade bombs in the school.

  On September 10, 2004, President Putin approved a parliamentary investigation into the attack. He also complained about American and British calls for negotiations with Chechens, suggesting that this was equivalent to calling for negotiations with al Qaeda. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov complained that Western countries were giving asylum to Chechen separatists.

  On September 16, 2004, a key advisor to President Putin, Aslakhanov, said that the president had been prepared to release 30 Chechens during the siege. Aslakhanov said that he was about to go into the school to talk to the hostage-takers, with whom he had spoken by phone three times, when the explosives went off.

  The next day, Basayev, using the alias Abdallakh Shamil, said on Kavkaz-Center, an Islamic website based in Lithuania, that his group was responsible and threatened more attacks on Russian civilians if independence was denied. He said:

  The Kremlin vampire destroyed and wounded one thousand children and adults by giving the order to storm the school for the sake of imperial ambitions. . . . We are sorry about what happened in Beslan. It’s simply that the war, which Putin declared on us five years ago, which has destroyed more than forty thousand Chechen children and crippled more than five thousand of them, has gone back to where it started.

  The posting said that the terrorists “made a fatal mistake” by allowing a Russian emergency services vehicle onto school grounds to remove bodies of people killed in the initial storming of the building. He claimed that two terrorists who went outside to watch the removal of the bodies were shot by troops. He said that the terrorists had deployed 20 mines, connected together in one circuit. “I personally trained this group in a forest, and I tested this system. Either all bombs would have exploded or not a single one. . . . We suggest that independent experts should check the fragments and types of wounds,” implying that Russian bombs had killed the children. The posting claimed that there were 33 hostage-takers, including 2 Arabs. Basayev said that the operation cost 8,000 euros (circa $9,800) plus some weapons stolen from Russian forces. “I don’t know bin Laden, don’t receive any money from him, but would not mind.”

  On January 29, 2005, the parliamentary investigating commission said that some law enforcement officers were involved. Two accomplices had been detained, three were being sought, and paperwork was in the process to arrest two more. On May 29, 2007, a Russian court granted amnesty to three police officers who had been charged with negligence for failing to prevent the attack.

  On May 17, 2005, the trial began of lone surviving terrorist Kulayev on charges of murder and terrorism in the case. On May 16, 2006, the chief justice of the Supreme Court in North Ossetia ruled that Kulayev had taken part in murder and terrorism. On May 26, 2006, he was sentenced to life in prison.

  July 7, 2005

  U.K. Subway Bombings

  Overview: In the United States, the al Qaeda attack on the homeland is called 9/11; in the United Kingdom, London’s emotional equivalent was 7/7 (and the failed copycat attack in late July). London was brought to a standstill with bombings of the subway and bus systems as thousands of Londoners wondered if they would be the next victims.

  Incidents: On July 7, 2005, bombs exploded in three train stations and on a nearby double-decker bus, killing at least 49 people and wounding more than 700. (The tally eventually rose to 56 dead.) Several al Qaeda– affiliated groups, including the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, the Group of al Qaeda of Jihad Organization in Europe, and the Secret Organization of al Qaeda in Europe, claimed credit. Each device contained less than 10 pounds of explosives, enough to hide in a backpack. Timing devices apparently were used. Police worked with Spanish officials to determine whether there were links with the 3/11 Madrid train bombings in 2004.

  The bombs were apparently to form a cross radiating from King’s Cross, but the plan was foiled when one terrorist could not get on a train and had to settle for a bus.

  The bombings came a day after London was announced as the host for the 2012 Summer Olympics. They also came during the G-8 summit in Gleaneagles, Scotland, where world leaders held discussions about increasing aid to Africa.

  The bombs were nearly simultaneous. First reports indicated that at 8:51 A.M., a bomb placed on the floor of the third carriage of Circle Line subway train 204 carrying seven hundred passengers went off 100 yards from the Liverpool Street Station, killing 7 and wounding 100. The train was arriving from Aldgate Station. Police identified the bomber as Shehzad Tanweer, son of the Pakistani owner of a Leeds fish-and-chips shop, and a good friend of fellow bomber Hasib Hussain. Tanweer was a student of physical education at Leeds Metropolitan University and lived in Leeds’ Beeston district. Pakistani authorities said Tanweer visited Pakistan in 2004 and met with Osama Nazir, who was later arrested and charged with a 2002 grenade attack on an Islamabad church in which five people, including two Americans, were killed. Tanweer also spent several days at a madrassa near Lahore that had ties to
Lashkar-e-Taiba.

  At 8:56 A.M., a device placed on the floor of the first carriage, near the first set of double doors where passengers stand, went off three minutes out of the Russell Square Station en route to King’s Cross Station, killing at least 21 people on the Piccadilly Line train 311. More than 900 passengers were on board. The bomber was identified by police as Germaine Lindsay (aka Abdullah Shaheed Jamal), a Jamaica-born British citizen who grew up in a single-parent household in southern England. He converted to Islam at the urging of his mother, who also converted.

  At 9:17 A.M., a bomb placed on the floor of the second carriage of Circle Line train 216 leaving Edgware Road Station for Paddington Station exploded, killing seven people. The explosion ripped through a wall and damaged two other trains. The bomber was identified by police as Mohammed Sidique Khan, a teaching assistant at a Leeds public school. He was born in the United Kingdom to Pakistani parents. He was married and the father of an 8-month-old girl. He had recently moved to Dewsbury. He earned a degree in education from Leeds University. He traveled to Karachi, Pakistan, with Tanweer on November 16, 2004, on a Turkish Airlines flight. They had stayed at separate addresses near Lahore. The Sunday Telegraph said that Khan, the leader of the team, met in Pakistan in fall 2004 with Mohammed Yasin (alias Ustad Osama), an explosives expert who manufactures suicide jackets for Harkat-e-Jihad.

  At 9:47 A.M., a bomb exploded on Bus No. 30 at Tavistock Square, killing 13 people. The bomb had been placed at the rear of the upper deck of the bus, which had been detoured because of the King’s Cross/Russell Square bombing. Some theorized that the bomber had intended to hit another train but was prevented from entering a train station when all had closed. Police said Hussain, an unemployed Muslim, then hopped on a bus and was attempting to reset the timer when the bomb went off. The Pakistani lived in Leeds and had completed vocational business studies at Matthew Murray High School. He became more religious two years earlier. He flew to Karachi, Pakistan, on a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight from Riyadh on July 15, 2004.