May I comment briefly on "Revisiting Russia's Apartment Block Blasts" (JRL 2006 #24 item 24 January 26)? Robert Bruce Ware's article in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies is an important contribution to the task of shedding light on a matter which the Russian authorities have done a great deal to keep concealed.

I have to disagree with Dr Ware's case as a consequence of points of significance omitted from his discussion, namely the evidence that there was advance planning of the bomb blasts at the highest reaches of the government of the Russian Federation. In a presentation several years ago Professor John B Dunlop, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, drew attention to press reports that were suggestive. Here is the first: "On 6 June 1999 ­ a full three months before the terror bombings in Moscow ­ a Swedish journalist, Jan Blomgren, reported in the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that one option being considered by the Kremlin leadership and its associates was a series of `terror bombings' in Moscow which could be blamed on the Chechens. (See The Independent [London], 29 January 2000)."

Here is the second: "The well-known Russian journalist Alexandr Zhilin reported in the 22 July 1999 issue of Moskovskaya Pravda, more than a month before the bombings, that the administration of President Yeltsin had worked out and confirmed a broad plan for discrediting the candidacy of Mayor Yurii Luzhkov ­ a major candidate for Russian president in the upcoming year 2000 elections ­ involving a series of provocations designed to destabilize the socio-psychological situation in Moscow. President Yeltsin was said to have approved individual points of the program, and in circles close to Yeltsin's influential daughter, Tatyana Dyachanko, the plan was being called `Storm in Moscow'. Loud terrorist acts or attempts at such acts were to be part of the plan, according to Zhilin."

Finally there is the curious incident of the Duma speaker who announced to the lower house of the Russian parliament, on 13 September 1999, that the Volgodonsk apartment-building explosion had occurred three days in advance of the actual event. The official shorthand record of the proceedings of the State Duma on 13 September 1999 gives the following exchange:

Seleznev G.N. [speaker] ­ Here is another statement. It is reported from Rostov on Don that tonight a residential house was bombed in the town of Volgodonsk.

Zhirinovsky V.V. [deputy speaker] ­ And there is a nuclear power station in Volgodonsk.

Three days later, 17 people were killed in Volgodonsk in a blast that destroyed a residential building.

If the speaker of the State Duma was able to announce on 13 September 1999 an explosion that did not happen until 16 September 1999, he must have received - and accidentally published - an advance notification of an event planned by a person of some rank in official circles. No investigation of this matter was ever carried out.

These points amount to convincing evidence, to me, that Dr Ware's argument concerning Islamist extremists is not valid. It is a pity that the State Duma decided not to investigate these terrible atrocities with a properly constituted commission of inquiry in 1999. On the contrary, to their shame, the Russian authorities continue to make every effort to keep things dark. Mikhail Trepashkin, in prison on a trumped-up charge, is one of the better-known victims of their obsession with secrecy.