Helena Merriman

It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.

I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.

What did they miss the first time?

The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service.

Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

So I'm Helena Merriman.

I'm a journalist.

I reported for the BBC for many years, from frontline war reporting to elections.

And I'd say for me, one of the interesting things through my career has been looking at that meeting point between journalism and history, which is partly what this podcast does.

Well, as a journalist, as much as I love looking at what's going on right now in the present, I think I've always been drawn to stories in the past where the dust hasn't quite settled.

And I think the story of the apartment bombs is probably one of the most intriguing examples of that.

In fact, I'd say it's probably one of the most important unresolved stories of recent history.

So it's about four bombs that blew up four apartments in September 1999.

killing hundreds of people while they slept.

What's interesting about this story is that even now, there are these huge disagreements about who bombed those four apartments.

So the government blamed Chechen militants, but others blamed the FSB, which is Russia's internal security service, partly because of very strange, murky things that went on at the time, which I'm sure we'll get into later.

But it's also a story that tells us so much about one of the most powerful men in the world today, Vladimir Putin, because he becomes president right at the time of the bombs.

So if you want to understand Putin's origin story, this is a really important place to start.