Dmitry Alexeyevich Komar

Komar's death is a case in which the testimony of witnesses and investigators diverged, and the official conclusion long coexisted with dissenting accounts. According to the investigation's version, around midnight on 21 August 1991 he climbed onto a BMP (hull number 536) from a column moving away from the White House toward Smolenskaya Square, intending to cover its observation slit and blind the crew; the gunner rotated the turret to throw him off, but he caught up again and jumped into the open troop hatch. When the driver sharply jerked the vehicle he was thrown from it, and with his clothing caught on the open hatch cover he struck his head against the hull and died. Other accounts report that he climbed onto the vehicle together with Major Sergei Churin, another Afghan war veteran, to cover the observation slit with a tarpaulin, and that, ignoring the major's prohibition, he tried to enter through the open rear hatch; as the vehicle swerved sharply his leg caught on the hatch and he hung there before falling to the asphalt some time later. In this version the driver reversed and crushed him. The article on the tunnel incident likewise summarizes that he caught himself on the tarpaulin as he threw it over the observation slit and sustained a fatal head injury during the vehicle's sudden manoeuvre.

A criminal case was opened against the crew of BMP 536, but on 20 December 1991 it was closed by decision of the Moscow Prosecutor's Office for 'absence of signs of a criminally punishable act'. The circumstances of the death remained contested afterwards. In 1992 his mother, citing contradictions between the official finding on the death and witness testimony, in particular that of the soldier Koshkarbai Baimuratov, who fired a shot but was not certain he had hit anyone, asked the Russian Prosecutor General to exhume her son's body and conduct a further examination. Separately, Yuri Ivanov, who defended one of the accused in the State Emergency Committee case, put forward another version, that Komar jumped onto the armored vehicle with a crowbar and opened its hatch, and that the soldier Sainkhadzhaev inside, seeing a man with a crowbar appear in the opening, fired an automatic weapon and killed him; the lawyer also asserted that Komar had been moderately intoxicated. The direct cause of death has thus never been fixed as a single fact: some circumstances describe him as crushed by the vehicle, others as shot. The three men killed in the tunnel incident were recorded as the only fatalities of the 1991 coup, and above all the episode is emphasized as one of the factors that kept the State Emergency Committee members from attempting an assault on the White House.