Who Wants To Compensate Nord Ost Musical Former Hostages?

Moscow government is not willing to pay at all

If a court upholds the lawsuits that were filed by former hostages of the Moscow music theatre, living in Moscow will become more expensive. This is what Vladimir Platonov, the chairman of the Moscow government said in his interview to Echo of Moscow radio station. “This is a part of the budgetary spending, but there should be revenues as well. We did not plan that spending in the budget of the year 2003,” said Mr. Platonov. 

The chairman of the Moscow government (or the Moscow City Duma, as it is officially called) said, if a court rules to pay compensations to former hostages in the sum that they claim, it will make up one-tenth of the annual budget of the city of Moscow. Platonov also stated that the Moscow government had already paid compensations to the people, who suffered from the hostage crisis. Vladimir Platonov believes that former hostages should go to the federal government to ask for more compensations. This is stipulated by the anti-terrorist law. The law runs that if a federation unit is unable to compensate people for an act of terrorism that happened on its territory, the money is to be collected from the federal budget.

Vladimir Platonov mentioned that former hostages’ lawyers should have pointed out a co-defendant in their suits at once (with reference to the mentioned part of the anti-terrorist law). The chairman of the Moscow government thinks that there is obviously no such funds in the budget of the Russian capital.

Mr. Platonov’s logic is rather interesting. He says that living in Moscow will become more expensive. Doesn’t it get more and more expensive every month? The prices on transportation, public utilities, food and so on keep going up. It seems that common people’s life is a lot different, if you look at it from the point of view of an official. Now the Moscow government has someone to shift the blame on – former hostages of the Nord Ost musical. They can now be blamed for all troubles of the metropolitan life. The Moscow government paid former hostages the compensation of 50 thousand rubles ($1.5 thousand) and 100 thousand rubles (three thousand dollars) to the relatives of those people, who died. Moscow officials wonder, what else they want from them.

Dmitry Chirkin
PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov