The head of a parliamentary commission investigating the September hostage seizure at a school in southern Russia said there is evidence pointing to involvement by a foreign intelligence agency, the Interfax news agency reported yesterday.

The statement was the latest of several in which Russian officials and politicians have alleged that foreigners were involved in the September 1-3 attack on a school in the southern town of Beslan, which ended in bloody chaos and left more than 330 people dead, many of them children.

“For the moment the evidence that we have of this involvement is indirect, so I consider it premature to name which special service it is,” Interfax quoted commission head Alexander Torshin as saying. Russians refer to intelligence and security agencies as special services.

Torshin, deputy speaker of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper parliament house, said “when we gather enough convincing evidence, we won’t hide it”.

Russian officials initially said the attackers killed at the school included nine or 10 Arabs, but they never provided any proof of that.

Shamil Basayev, a Chechen warlord who claimed responsibility for the raid, said his militants who seized the school included two Arabs.

Meanwhile, Russian security forces killed an alleged top aide to radical Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev after he put up armed resistance to arrest, the Federal Security Service said on Friday.

Akhmed Sambiyev, known as the White Arab, was killed late Thursday in a confrontation with police and security service officers in a private house in Ingushetia, a southern Russian region bordering on Chechnya, said Yuri Smolyaninov, a spokesman for the Ingush branch of the security service.

Two other militants were killed and two captured in clashes with police and Russian troops in Chechnya on Friday, while an abducted Interior Troops soldier was freed by Chechen security officers, police and media reports said.

Three security force officers were wounded in the operation to capture Sambiyev in the Ingush city of Nazran, Smolyaninov said.

Earlier, the Ingush Interior Ministry had said an alleged, unnamed militant was killed when he detonated a homemade bomb during an attempt to detain him, and another militant was taken into custody.

Sambiyev, who the ITAR-Tass news agency said was either Syrian or Turkish, was an expert in explosives with close links to international terrorist groups, Smolyaninov said.

ITAR-Tass quoted him as saying that Sambiyev had succeeded Abu Kuteib, an Arab terrorist and Basayev aide who was allegedly killed in July. Basayev has claimed responsibility for the terrifying school seizure in Beslan and other terror attacks in Russia that have killed more than 440 people.

On Friday, a Russian reconnaissance squad killed an alleged militant and arrested two others in the Chechen capital Grozny.