Another clue hinting at the involvement of the FSB was an open letter, published on
March 14, 2005, in the Novaya Gazeta. The open letter was written by Achemez Gochiyaev, a native of Karachaevo-Cherkessia
in the North Caucasus, who was sought by the police in connection with the apartment
bombings.[25] Gochiyaev told how, before the bombings, he had been contacted by a certain Ramazan
Dyshekov, a former classmate, with a business proposal to sell mineral water. In order
to stock the water, the other had told him, it was necessary to rent basements in
apartment buildings in Moscow and Ryazan. After the second explosion in Moscow Gochiyaev
sensed he had been trapped, suspecting that Dyshekov was an FSB agent. He called the
police and gave the addresses of other buildings where basements were rented. That
is how other explosions in Moscow were able to be prevented. In his open letter Gochiyaev
accused the FSB of having organized the Moscow bombings and Dyshekov of being an FSB
agent. He asked for an independent, international investigation.
The Duma Investigation Commission
In such a serious situation, in which there are allegations that a government has
used state terror against its own citizens, one would expect a government to do anything
to clear its name and remove any doubt. “The idea that the secret services might have
had something to do with the apartment bombings evoked indignation in Putin,” the
Moscow Times wrote. “To even speculate about this is immoral and in essence none other than an
element of the information war against Russia,” he was quoted as saying.[26] By qualifying investigation as speculation and speculating as immoral, Putin obviously
wanted to block any serious investigation into the facts. The problem, however, was
that the facts that had emerged revealed so many unsolved problems and contradictions that they only strengthened
the rumors of involvement of the government and the secret services. A government
that has nothing to hide would be anxious that a thorough and impartial investigation
would take place, in which the investigators would be given full, complete, and unrestricted
access to all documents and to any further information that they deemed relevant.
However, it was not the government, but the Duma that established an investigation
commission in 2002. On July 25, 2002, the members of the Duma Commission organized
a teleconference from Moscow with Alexander Litvinenko, Yury Felshtinsky, and Tatyana
Morozova, who were in London. The first two were the authors of the book FSB vzryvaet Rossiyu (translated in English with the title Blowing Up Russia), in which they accused the FSB of being behind the apartment bombings.[27] The president of the Duma Commission, Sergey Kovalyov (the former president of
Yeltsin’s Presidential Human Rights Commission), complained that the government did
not give the information requested and was hiding itself behind “state secrets.”[28]
