Beslan Attacker Gets Life In Prison

A southern Russian court on Friday sentenced the sole surviving Beslan school attacker to life in prison, capping a yearlong trial that survivors and victims' relatives say has left the most essential questions about the tragedy unanswered.

They demand to know just who bore the most responsibility: Nur-Pashi Kulayev and his 31 fellow militants, or the officials whose negligence or even alleged complicity allowed them to seize hundreds of children and parents on the first day of school in September 2004.

"I did not go to court to become convinced of Kulayev's guilt, but to reconstruct all the circumstances of the terrorist attack and find the truth," said Aneta Gadiyeva, whose daughter was killed. "But I did not learn anything new and did not get any answers."

Only a Russian ban on capital punishment restricted his sentence to life in prison, and only courtroom guards saved Kulayev from the explosion of rage that came next as relatives of the dead sought to get their hands on him, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth.

The North Ossetian Supreme Court found Kulayev guilty of taking hostages, responsibility for the deaths of 330 people in September 2004 and of inflicting material damage worth $1.3 million.

However, as CBS News Moscow bureau chief Beth Knobel reports, Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev admitted planning the Beslan attack, though he did not take part. He has evaded the Russians for years, even though he is public enemy number one in Russia. He is thought to be hiding in the woods and mountains of southern Chechnya.

Ruslan Alikov, whose mother Dariga was a teacher who died in the school, says that the Russian government just isn't looking hard enough for Basayev.

"Can he really be so hard to find?" asks Alikov, a college student in Moscow. "If the Russians really wanted to find him, they would have found him already."

And as for the Kulayev verdict? "Only the death sentence would have brought some justice," Alikov tells Knobel.

Judge Tamerlan Aguzarov said that Kulayev had detonated a bomb that had dealt bodily harm to hostages and government troops. He said that 16 male hostages whom the militants executed on the first day of the assault had died in part due to Kulayev's actions.

Kulayev was also found guilty of shooting children and other hostages who tried to escape the school on the chaos-filled third day of the crisis. He had claimed in court that while he participated in the raid, he did not kill anyone.

Asked whether he understood the verdict, Kulayev, a Chechen, nodded his freshly shaved head to indicate yes. He has 10 days to appeal the sentence.

Prosecutors had demanded the death penalty for Kulayev, but Russia suspended the death penalty when it joined the Council of Europe a decade ago. Deputy Prosecutor-General Nikolai Shepel, who led the government's case, said he was satisfied with the verdict.

"Kulayev has been pronounced guilty on all counts," Shepel told reporters.

The verdict also raises the question of whether any of the hostage-takers got away. The scene around school number one was so chaotic as the school was being stormed, that the terrorists could have melded into the crowd and escaped, reports Knobel.

Survivors have told investigators that remains of some of the terrorists with whom they talked in the school gym were not among the 32 bodies of the hostage-takers displayed by Russian authorities.

But victims' relatives were deeply critical of the trial, and the Mothers of Beslan activist group accused prosecutors of carrying out a "superficial and one-sided investigation ... meant only to establish the terrorists' and Kulayev's guilt."

The group said investigators had not probed who was responsible for a chain of alleged errors: the failure to take security measures in spite of a heightened danger of terrorist attacks, the refusal to negotiate with the hostage-takers, underreporting the number of hostages involved early in the crisis, the lack of preparation for storming the school, the unpreparedness of the rescue services and the "uncontrolled use of tanks, flame-throwers, grenade-launchers and other weapons."

Shepel repeated Friday that the prosecutors' view that the officials handling the rescue operation had not been negligent.

"The actions of the members of the operational headquarters have been investigated. We found their actions did not constitute a crime," Shepel told reporters.

On the street outside the court, pandemonium broke out after the court session as relatives shouted and tussled with one another and with reporters.

"I expected the death penalty and it is not right he was sentenced to life in prison," said Rita Sidakova, a leader of the Mothers of Beslan activist group. "He is guilty of the deaths of hundreds of people but himself has remained alive and my daughter is dead."

But Ella Kesayeva, of the rival Voice of Beslan organization, said Kulayev remained too valuable a witness to allow to be killed.

"Preserving Kulayev's life gives us hope that all circumstances of the terrorist act in Beslan sooner or later will be investigated," Kesayeva said. "Alive, Kulayev can give evidence on the main part of the case. We hope to learn the truth about Beslan."

Meanwhile, amid the sentencing, a Russian lawmaker is claiming security forces used heavy weapons, such as flame throwers, during the Beslan school hostage-taking, contradicting official findings that no such weapons were used while hostages were inside the school, a newspaper reported Friday.

Yuri Savelyev of the nationalist Rodina party, an explosions and fire specialist, on Thursday presented a report based on his independent investigation into the September 2004 tragedy that left 331 people dead, the Kommersant daily reported.

Savelyev's report goes against prosecutors' findings, which conclude that federal forces used heavy weaponry such as grenade launchers and tanks against militants only after all the surviving victims had been evacuated from the school.

Savelyev's report, however, also steers clear of discussing one of the most contentious topics: what caused the blast inside the school on the third day of the crisis, an event that triggered a hail of gunfire and explosions by militants and federal troops that resulted in most of the deaths.