Hundreds held hostage
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, September 1, 2004
BESLAN, Russia – Armed militants with explosives strapped to their bodies stormed a Russian school in a region bordering Chechnya on Wednesday, corralling hundreds of hostages – many of them children – into a gymnasium and threatening to blow up the building if surrounding Russian troops attacked.
Casualty reports varied, but an official in the command operation said today 16 people were killed – 12 inside the school, two who died in a hospital and two others whose bodies still lay outside and could not be removed because of gunfire. The official said 13 were wounded.
Camouflage-clad special forces carrying assault rifles encircled Middle School No. 1 in the North Ossetian town of Beslan. Earlier, a little girl in a flowered dress fled the school holding a soldier’s hand; officials said about a dozen other people managed to escape by hiding in a boiler room.
A militant sniper took position on a top floor of the three-story school, and hours into the standoff Russian security officials used a phone number they were given and began negotiations with the hostage-takers – widely believed linked to Chechen rebels suspected in a string of deadly attacks that appeared connected with last Sunday’s presidential election in the war-ravaged republic.
More than 1,000 people, including many distraught parents, crowded outside police cordons demanding information and accusing the government of failing to protect their children.
The hostage-taking came less than 24 hours after a suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station that killed at least nine people, and just over a week after near-simultaneous explosions blamed on terrorism caused two Russian planes to crash, killing all 90 people on board.
From inside the school, the militants sent out a list of demands and threatened that if police intervened, they would kill 50 children for every hostage-taker killed and 20 children for every hostage-taker injured, Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the North Ossetia region’s Interior Ministry, was quoted as telling the ITAR-Tass news agency.
They also demanded the release of fighters detained over a series of attacks on police facilities in Ingushetia in June, ITAR-Tass reported, citing regional officials.
Associated Press
Women wait for news near a school seized by attackers Wednesday in Beslan, Russia.
