Helena Merriman

In Russia, just a few days after those apartment buildings were bombed, the government removes what was left of those apartment buildings.

So a lot of the forensic evidence that might have existed is never found.

You know, compare that to 9-11.

when that site was a crime scene for months and months and months after.

So when various lawyers do get access to some of the government files on the reports, there's very little found.

But there is eventually a trial, and that takes place in October 2003.

And by that point, there's only two people that the government has managed to find who they say are responsible for the bombs.

And were they Chechen?

Well, good question.

You would expect them to be, given that this is who the government blamed for the bombs, but they're not.

They'd arrested a number of people, quite a few of them from Dagestan, which is a republic next to Chechnya.

And in the end, you have this trial.

It goes on for two months.

These two men, non-Chechens, are found guilty for a string of charges, handling explosives, but also for being connected to two of those four bombs and they're sentenced to life in prison.

Yeah, it's the question we've wrestled with for weeks and months as we've been looking at this story.

When you look at it by the end...

There's a lot of circumstantial evidence.

There are a lot of theories.

There are a lot of theories that point in both directions.

You can make an argument that the Chechen militants had the motive to do it.