RUSSIA - Sep 10 - Under pressure, Putin promises inquiry.

In an unusual retreat under public pressure, Pres Putin promises an open inquiry into the Sep 1-3 slaughter of hostages in a schoolhouse, although the forum he choose leaves critics doubtful of his good faith. After insisting that only a closed internal inquiry would be held, Putin said that the upper house of Parliament would begin an inquiry on Sept. 20 to provide "a full and objective picture of all the tragic events linked with the hostage taking". His brief announcement on TV came as anguish continued to be expressed publicly and questions multiplied about the events in which more than 300 people died, nearly half of them children. In an interview Sep 10, a spokesman for the FSB, provided new details that answered some of the questions about the hostage taking as well as the bombing of two Russian passenger jets a few days earlier in which 90 people died. But the relatively tame Russian press has maintained a hot emotional tone. One newspaper, Vechernaya Moskva, printed the portrait of a forlorn-looking child in the center of a black front page, accompanied only by the words, "Who is guilty"? "Putin looks unusually weak and helpless", said Andrei Mironov, a human rights campaigner. "Never before have I heard people talking about him this way". Like other several other analysts, though, Mironov said he did not expect a full and genuine inquiry. Putin's announcement came as members of the slightly less tractable lower house of Parliament said they might open their own investigation. "I think he has been pushed into a compromise, an attempt to make an investigation that is not so critical", said Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the most outspoken members of the lower house, or Duma. Nevertheless, he said it was a significant concession. "Never before has Parliament participated in this kind of investigation", he said. The crisis for Putin is caused by the fact that he has based his presidency on an image of toughness and strength, Ryzhkov said. "Now he has to explain to the Russian public how it is possible that so strong a hand, such a tough guy, a man who has all the power and lots of money - including oil money - how it is possible to be so inefficient and so weak". He noted that more than 2,000 people had died in terrorist acts since Putin became president four and a half years ago. He and others reeled off more than a dozen questions about the events last week, as well as crucial questions that remain unanswered from past attacks that were not publicly investigated. The FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko, described what seemed to be a well-planned and well-supplied operation at the school in Beslan, in North Ossetia in southern Russia. He said that there appeared to have been 32 hostage takers, divided into three cells, and that they had brought their weapons with them rather than hiding them under the floorboards of the school beforehand, as had been reported earlier. He said that they had brought gas masks and shattered windows to protect against a gas attack by authorities and that the bombs they had installed were homemade, weighing about a kilogram each, or slightly more than two pounds, and packing about 1,000 pieces of shrapnel into the bottoms of large plastic bottles. Only two exploded, apparently by accident. "If they had all gone off at once, nothing would be left", he said. Ignatchenko said it had not been firmly established that a Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, had ordered the raid, although he remained the chief suspect. He said: "The way it was organised, it was quite similar to what he did before. It is kind of his handwriting". These are the kinds of details that have never emerged, for example, about the seizure of a theater in Moscow in late 1992 in which 129 hostages and all 41 hostage takers died. At that time, Putin refused calls for a public accounting, and a supposed internal inquiry has never been completed. Ryzhkov said: "There is no one to answer to the relatives of the victims. And people in North Ossetia know that. That's the reason people in Ossetia and Moscow and across the country are demanding an investigation". Among the unanswered questions are how the attackers drove three vehicles filled with armed men past checkpoints, why elementary security measures were not taken during the standoff and why the armed response was so disorganised. There are questions about how the security services failed to detect planning for this and previous spectacular raids, why authorities hid the true number of hostages, why they did not tell the public about the hostage takers' demands and, as one person put it, "why officials lied to us so much and so often". Ryzhkov said: "Putin is an authoritarian leader and people don't talk about some of these things. But that does not mean they don't think".