MOSCOW — The deadly Chechen militant attack on a school in southern Russia has produced a split in the rebel cause, Russian officials claimed on Saturday.
In what was an apparent attempt to exploit the division, Russia announced earlier this week that it would pay $10 million for information leading to the arrest of the top Chechen rebel leaders, Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov.
Federal Security Service Maj.-Gen. Ilya Shabalkin underlined on Saturday that rebels were eligible for the reward.
Officials say Chechens were among the 11 attackers who have been identified, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday the hostage-taking was directed by Basayev — the most notorious of the warlords leading Chechen rebels who have been fighting Russian forces for five years. Lavrov said Maskhadov, Chechnya's president from 1996-99, also was linked to the hostage-taking.
The clarification about the reward by Shabalkin, a spokesman for the Russian forces' Chechnya operations, appeared to be aimed at exploiting reported dissension in the fighters' ranks over taking over at the school in the Northern Ossetian city of Beslan.
The hostage-taking at the school in the Northern Ossetian city of Beslan ended Sept. 3 in a frenzy of shooting and explosions and the deaths of at least 330 people. Subsequent news accounts said former hostages claimed some rebels argued with their leader once they found out they were to take children hostages.
Some accounts said the raiders' leader shot one of the dissidents and then detonated by remote control the suicide bomb belts worn by two women raiders.
"Information coming from various channels to law-enforcement organs shows that after the commission of the terrorist act in Beslan there is a tense situation and atmosphere of conflict between the fighters," Shabalkin's office said in a statement.
The Federal Security Service "is prepared to cooperate with anybody, among them members of illegal armed formations without harming their personal security or restricting their right to the monetary reward," the statement said.
Russia previously had offered amnesty to rebels who laid down arms. It was not immediately clear if Shabalkin's statement about personal security meant that rebels could receive the reward without renouncing their violent cause.
Akhmed Zakayev, an envoy for the former Chechnya president Maskhadov, was quoted in the German magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday as saying both he and Maskhadov had offered to negotiate during the crisis and that Maskhadov's followers had no connection with the warlord Basayev.
"This act has caused greater damage (to the Chechen separatist cause) than 10 years of the darkest anti-Chechen propaganda," Zakayev was quoted as saying. The first Russian-Chechnya war started in 1994 and ended 20 months later with Russian forces withdrawing.
Also Saturday, the newspaper Gazeta reported that the leader of the band of hostage-takers was believed to be Ruslan Khuchbarov, from the neighboring province of Ingushetia. It said he was not among the dead.
But deputy prosecutor-general Vladimir Kolesnikov said attack leader, whom he did not name, was among the dead.
"He has received what he deserved and is in a refrigerator now," Kolesnikov was quoted by news agencies as saying.
Inquiries were growing about scores of people missing after the hostage-taking's chaotic end. Reports say more than 100 of the estimated 1,200 hostages have not been accounted for.
The state television channel Rossiya has established a Web site to which relatives seeking information on missing people can send photographs and contact information. As of Saturday morning, those being sought through the site had grown to 69.
On Saturday, the Interfax news agency cited the Russian health ministry as saying 353 people wounded in the hostage-taking remained hospitalized, including 216 children.