Moscow ? Russian police investigating the deadly Beslan school siege are looking inside their own squad house: One of the attack organizers was allegedly a former cop who disappeared six years ago.

He wouldn’t be the first to turn traitor. Turncoats have appeared in the highest ranks of law enforcement in the Caucasus. Police have been implicated in kidnappings for ransom and accused of allowing Chechen rebels free passage through checkpoints — motivated by either money, sympathy for the fighters’ cause or family ties, or a combination of all three.

Vyacheslav Izmailov, a former army major who has worked to resolve kidnappings in Chechnya, said one example of a high-ranking turncoat was a former interior minister of Ingushetia, a Russian region neighboring Chechnya. Daud Korigov, minister from 1997-98, gave rebels the use of a house he owned in the Chechen capital Grozny and was even seen there among captives, Izmailov said.

How many turncoats are there among law enforcement?

“It’s not a few,” Izmailov told The Associated Press.

Russian authorities say one of the plotters behind the attack in Beslan, where more than 330 people died, was Ali Taziyev, a policeman from Ingushetia. Taziyev was allegedly abducted with another officer in October 1998 while guarding the wife of a government official.

The woman was freed in 2000, and the body of Taziyev’s partner was found in Chechnya. Later that year, a court in Ingushetia declared Taziyev dead.

Now, Russian officials believe he actually went over to the rebel side, changing his name to Magomed Yevloyev and taking the nom de guerre “Magas” after the new Ingush capital, the Vremya Novostei newspaper reported.

Taziyev, a Muslim, is accused of becoming an adherent of the extreme Wahhabi sect of Islam — the same as al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and the official state religion of Saudi Arabia — and forming his own small band of fighters.

Islam is the predominant religion in the Caucasus. North Ossetia, where the school siege took place, is unusual in that its predominant faith is Russian Orthodox.

So far, Taziyev’s participation hasn’t been confirmed in the attack in Beslan, North Ossetia — which shares borders with both Ingushetia and Chechnya — and his body wasn’t among the attackers who died there after Russian forces stormed the building Sept. 3.

Questions remain about whether Taziyev was a turncoat while still a policeman — or whether he was turned to the rebel cause by his captors after he was purportedly kidnapped.

It’s highly unlikely an honest police officer would have been kidnapped and turned to the rebel side without prior militant ties, said Yulia Latynina, a political analyst and columnist.

“I find it very suspicious that a real policeman who was kidnapped by the Chechen rebels was not killed immediately,” she said. “If there’s such a story, it’s more probable to suspect he was in on the kidnapping from the beginning.”