“Military action is the last resort in the fight against terrorism,” Baluyevsky said

MOSCOW, September 8 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Russia said  Wednesday, September 8, it is willing to launch pre-emptive strikes on “terrorist bases” worldwide few days after the hostage-taking tragedy that ended in a bloodbath at a school in the southern city of Beslan.

“With regard to preventive strikes on terrorist bases, we will take any action to eliminate terrorist bases in any region of the world. But this does not mean we will carry out nuclear strikes,” Agence France-Presse quoted Chief of Staff General Yuri Baluyevsky as saying.

Baluyevsky added that Russia's choice of action “will be determined by the concrete situation wherever it may be in the world”.

“Military action is the last resort in the fight against terrorism,” he added.

The policy shift followed the school hostage-taking tragedy that claimed the lives of hundreds of people, most of them children.

More than 1,200 people were taken hostage in Beslan in the nearby province of North Ossetia.

Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov revised Wednesday the death toll down to 326. Only 210 bodies have been identified.

The broadcast on Russian television of graphic footage filmed by militants inside the school added to the horror as Beslan residents prepared to bury more dead.

The pictures showed the school gym littered with what appeared to be bombs and bomb-making equipment and crammed with hostages, watched over by around six of the masked militants, one of whom was heard murmuring.

Authorities have blamed the hostage crisis on “international terrorists” -- something that critics said was a fig leaf to mask the failure of Russia's Chechen policy.

Bounty Declared

A file photo for Basayev (L) and Maskhadov

Moscow further put a 10-million-dollar price tag on the heads of two Chechen leaders accused of masterminding the hostage-taking.

The FSB security service, in a statement quoted by Interfax news agency, said Wednesday that it would pay 300 million rubles “for reliable information on their whereabouts leading to the neutralization of former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and of warlord Shamil Basayev.

It said the two were responsible for “inhuman” acts of terrorism carried out in Russia.

The statement gave the numbers of telephone hotlines in Moscow and in Chechnya which would be open 24 hours a day, and it promised to protect the identity and physical safety of any informer.

It did not spell out what was meant by “neutralization” and it did not specify whether the 300-million-ruble bounty would be paid in part or in full if only one of the two men was captured, killed or otherwise put out of action.

On Tuesday, September 7, Maskhadov issued a statement through a spokesman in London denying involvement with the school tragedy.

Maskhadov, elected president of Chechnya in 1997 during its short-lived de facto independence after the first 1994-96 Chechen war, said in his statement that “there can be no justification for terrorist acts against innocent citizens”.

Russian officials who had paraded the surviving hostage-taker on television on Monday night quoted him as saying that Maskhadov and Basayev had ordered the hostage-taking to “provoke a war across the Caucasus”.

Maskhadov's spokesman Akhmad Zakayev said the purpose of showing the gunman's confession was “to intimidate those who cast doubts over (Russian President) Vladimir Putin's policies and are calling for negotiations to be opened with Maskhadov”.

Putin was quoted Monday, September 6, by two British newspapers as angrily rejecting calls for negotiations with Chechen fighters, branding them “childkillers” and “bastards”.

Russia had previously offered rewards of $5 million for Basayev and $30,000 for Maskhadov.