The series of bomb attacks on apartment blocks in September 1999 claimed 300 lives and brought terror to the streets of Moscow and two other Russian cities.

Unknown terrorists had rented accommodation on the ground floor of the apartment blocks and filled them with explosives which destroyed the buildings.

Hundreds of dead and injured were plucked from the rubble as the attacks continued over many days and more than 30,000 buildings were searched in Moscow as panic took hold.

The Kremlin pointed the finger at rebels in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. It used the blasts to justify a new wave of “anti-terrorist” operations and, a few weeks later, troops were sent back into Chechnya for a second time.

But doubts have persisted about the Kremlin’s official version of events. Sceptics have argued that Chechen rebels had nothing to gain from planting the bombs. The Chechens had won the first war in 1996 and had already gained de facto independence.

The new war, however, benefited one man: Vladimir Putin, now Russian president. At the time he had only recently been appointed prime minister and was a little known figure among the Russian electorate.

In the space of a few months his popularity rating shot up from 2% to 70%, mainly as a result of the image the war created. He was a man of action determined to go after Chechen terrorists.

As a result, critics of the Kremlin in Russia and the West have for years claimed that the Federal Security Service (FSB), the former KGB, played a role in the bombings. This is an allegation that is vehemently denied by the Russian authorities. Putin has called it “immoral”.

But whatever the truth about who planted the bombs, one incident in particular has raised suspicion over the role played by the FSB.

On the night of September 22, 1999, when tensions were at their height, a passer-by in the city of Ryazan, 120 miles southeast of Moscow, saw a group of people unloading bags from a car boot into the basement of an apartment block building.

The police were called and raided the building. They announced that they had found a detonator and bags containing hexogen, the same explosive used in the other bombings. The Russian interior minister proudly announced that a terrorist attack had been foiled.

But only an hour later the Kremlin did an about turn. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB and a close Putin ally, went on air to say that the suspicious powder discovered in Ryazan was in fact just sugar. The incident, he claimed, had been part of an FSB civil defence exercise.

The “sugar” was later blown up, preventing any further tests. The FSB went on to claim that the bomb expert who had identified the hexogen had made a mistake because his hands were tainted with the explosive.

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