secrets in the investigation. They did not receive any official answer to this request. However, the Mothers received an anonymous video, which they disclosed saying it might prove that the Russian security forces started the massacre by firing rocket-propelled grenades on the besieged building. The film had been kept secret by the authorities for nearly three years before being officially released by the Mothers on 4 September 2007. The graphic film apparently shows the prosecutors and military experts surveying the unexploded shrapnel-based bombs of the militants and structural damage in the school in Beslan shortly after the massacre. Footage shows a large hole in the wall of the sports hall, with a man saying, "The hole in the wall is not from this [kind of] explosion. Apparently someone fired [there]", adding that many victims bear no sign of shrapnel wounds. In another scene filmed next morning, a uniformed investigator points out that most of the IEDs in the school actually did not go off, and then points out a hole in the floor which he calls a "puncture of an explosive character". Government response In general, the criticism was rejected by the Russian government. President Vladimir Putin specifically dismissed the foreign criticism as Cold War mentality and said that the West wants to "pull the strings so that Russia won't raise its head." The Russian government defended the use of tanks and other heavy weaponry, arguing that it was used only after surviving hostages escaped from the school. However, this contradicts the eyewitness accounts, including by the reporters and former hostages. According to the survivors and other witnesses, many hostages were seriously wounded and could not possibly escape by themselves, while others were kept by the terrorists as human shields and moved through the building. Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia Nikolai Shepel, acting as deputy prosecutor at the trial of the sole surviving attacker, found no fault with the security forces in handling the siege, "According to the conclusions of the investigation, the expert commission did not find any violations that could be responsible for the harmful consequences." Shepel acknowledged that commandos fired flamethrowers, but said this could not have sparked the fire that caused most of the deaths; he also said that the troops did not use napalm during the attack. To address doubts, in 2005 Putin launched a Duma parliamentary investigation led by Alexander Torshin, resulting in the