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Two Trucks with Fleeing Chechens

The planes attacked several trucks, killing scores of refugees. Human Rights Watch received consistent corroborating testimony describing two of these trucks. According to eyewitnesses, one of these trucks was full of civilians. Some reported that forty-four people were killed in it. The other truck carried four civilians. Two managed to jump out before the impact. The other two were killed.

Many eyewitnesses described seeing two battered KAMAZ trucks not far from one another, one on the road, the other turned over in the ditch. One eyewitness who drove passed the scene said:

I saw a smashed truck, the entire top had been demolished, the cabin. It stood on the road facing the direction of Grozny. We passed it on the right side.... It hadn’t moved, they bombed it right on the road. And there was a second truck.... I will never forget that truck. It lay turned over in the ditch, flames started to come out of the gas tank and a woman covered in blood walked out, apparently from the cabin.... I couldn’t see her face, only blood.³⁷

One woman told Human Rights Watch that she saw one of the trucks, and that it had suffered a direct hit, was turned over and burned out. According to the woman, a crib lay next to it on the road. The woman heard that forty-four people had died in the truck.³⁸

“Aibi Sulumov” (not his real name), who himself traveled on a bus that only suffered from some shrapnel, helped to collect the wounded and dead for transportation.

[I saw] a truck burned out. The planes flew away and we heaped together dead bodies. There were bodies without legs, without arms, without heads. From the shock I could not establish [the number of dead] exactly but I know I counted more than thirty-six bodies. There were probably forty of them.

Arbi Sulumov recalled three people in particular:

There were three people. One almost had his head ripped off, another had no legs and missed an arm, the third’s wrist was missing. We stopped whatever cars to take them to the hospital in Urus Martan.... One was from Vedeno, another from Komsomol’skoe beyond Gudermes, and the third from Naur. [The third] person was taken to Naur, we arranged that with some people. The man died. The one without the legs and arm, he died, but first regained consciousness and told us that he was from the 15 Molochnyi Sovkhoz and that his name was Olkhozani, and that was it. We buried him. Then there were two Russians, a man and a woman. The man was dead, the woman wounded, she was still talking and was standing from the shock....³⁹

Another woman described what is probably the same truck: “In front of us, there was a truck carrying about thirty or forty people, if not more. Old people, children, women.... A rocket, apparently, hit that vehicle, because it was completely smashed. They say that only one woman remained alive.”⁴⁰

A woman from Achkhoi Martan said that she was in the local hospital when the dead and wounded started to arrive from the site of the attack. She said there was a man from Shali whose relatives had all died when a truck was hit:

A man was taking out his relatives in that truck: his mother, sister, wife, two children and a cousin. They were taken to the hospital in Achkhoi Martan [and died]. He was from Shali. He walked around, cried, asked for a car to bring the dead bodies to Shali, [he kept saying] “I was trying to save them from death.” He survived but his whole family died before his eyes.⁴¹

Two eyewitnesses described the other truck. One woman said that a rocket hit a truck behind her. The truck, which carried four displaced people and a lot of household goods, immediately started to burn. The woman said that two of the passengers managed to jump out in time. The others were killed.⁴²