Let Our Fame Be Great (59 page)

The prosecutors asked for the death penalty – even though Russia has proclaimed a moratorium on its use – but the judge did not impose it. Sentencing Kulayev to death would have meant obliging Putin to pardon him, which would not have been a popular decision with the Kremlin, so Kulayev received life imprisonment. It appeared to be a fair end for an evil man.

Even his lawyer, a 25-year-old who had held a lawyer's licence for just a fortnight and who was only appointed to represent him ten days before the trial opened, clearly did not believe his client was innocent, and did not pretend to when appearing in court.

‘Of course, I did not want to defend him, but it is hard to argue with the decision of the court,' he told one local journalist after the first session.

‘Such cases cannot be examined without a lawyer in court. I was the duty lawyer at that time and I could not refuse,' he added, desperate to justify himself before his people, and to reassure them that he did not like or believe Kulayev.

‘I do not think this will mark the death of my career. I think there is an understanding that the defence of Kulayev is an obligation.'

Although I am not saying the lawyer did not do his job as well as he could, it is hard to see how this attitude was in his client's interests. He even began his summing up of his client's defence with an apology.

‘My position as lawyer of the accused Kulayev is very difficult, and internally contradictory,' he said.

‘You must understand me, I am a lawyer. I am tied to the position of my defendant. The defendant has the right to choose, his lawyer does not. Today I am not defending the crime, I am defending the rights of my defendant.'

Without even the faith of his lawyer, it was hard to sympathize with Kulayev. But after the trial, the vision of the gaunt, hollow-eyed man in his cage stayed with me. I only attended three of the sixty-seven sessions – it took six sessions for the judge to read out the 120,000 words of the sentence and summing up – but twice while I was listening the defendant had said the same thing.

‘I was there because of my brother,' he had said. I wondered for a while what he meant, then I forgot about it. A little while later, however, I discovered that a liberal activist keen on media freedom had paid for a secretary to type up a full record of all the court hearings, and had posted the transcripts on her website.

Having a spare few hours, I decided to go back and scan through the transcripts to find out what he had meant about his brother. I was interested in what would turn a normal human being into the kind of homicidal maniac who would abuse children to make a political point.

But I did not find any information to help me with that at all. The more of the transcripts I read, the more disturbed I became. Piecing together my own notes and the transcripts, I came to a worrying realization. Kulayev may not have been guilty at all. In fact, he may have been the unluckiest person to come out of School No. 1 alive.

No human rights groups or journalists have advocated for him. His cause, not surprisingly, has not proved popular with activists. Convicted terrorists are not prone to attracting sympathy. So I have no second opinion to back up my conclusions. But I approached the
evidence with an open mind, something his own lawyer and the rest of the court failed to do. The result was startling.

In his summing up of the case, the judge rejected the defendant's not guilty plea in a few sentences. He specifically quoted two Chechen witnesses – Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, the failed suicide bomber whose story is detailed in the previous chapter, and Rustam Ganiyev, a captured Chechen rebel also mentioned in the previous chapter – as confirming that Kulayev had been a member of Shamil Basayev's group of militants and that his own claims not to have been a militant were a lie.

This was my first disturbing discovery, because, in saying that, the judge was wrong. Neither of the two Chechen witnesses said anything of the kind.

Ganiyev, it transpired, had lived in the same house as Kulayev and Kulayev's brother, a former comrade-in-arms, and he knew the defendant well.

‘Did Nurpashi have relations to the rebels?' asked a prosecutor.

‘He did not,' answered Ganiyev.

As if that was not sufficiently categorical a rejection to satisfy the judge, a little later Kulayev himself asked the witness to confirm the point again.

‘Have you ever heard that I fought, or that I had weapons?' asked the defendant.

‘You did not, I said, you did not. I know you, because I lived in your house and everything. I saw you there and everyone else from your family.'

It is possible of course that the Chechen was lying to defend a friend or a comrade, but it is strange that the judge should so completely misrepresent not only what he said, but also what the second Chechen witness would go on to say. Muzhakhoyeva had also, it transpired, lived in the same house as Kulayev and knew him and his wife well.

‘Nurpashi Kulayev as far as I saw did not play any role. They never told him about any terrorist acts being prepared. He lived there with his wife Zhanna . . . He could go out, and they'd say: “Go, buy bread, or milk.” That's all. His wife never wore a veil even. He did not pray
particularly. I related to him, let's say, like to a decent person, not like to the others.'

According to her testimony, there were four rooms in the house, but Kulayev as the least significant person was left to sleep in the corridor. As the evidence continued, it departed further and further from the judge's summary of it. She said she never saw Kulayev with weapons, and also that he did not follow the extreme Wahhabi strand of Islam favoured by the others.

‘I never saw him make his wife wear a veil, like I or the other women had to. He never prayed together with these rebels,' she said.

Again, we might assume she was just trying to defend a friend of hers, but then she specifically said that she was not.

‘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.