BESLAN, Russia – Holding up the corpse of a man just shot dead in front of hundreds of hostages at a Russian school, the rebel – his pockets stuffed with ammunition and grenades – warned, “If a child utters even a sound, we’ll kill another one.”
When children fainted from lack of sleep, food and water, their masked and camouflaged captors simply sneered. In the intolerable heat of the gym, adults implored children to drink their own urine.
Hours after escaping alive, a woman who had been taken hostage with her 7-year-old son and her mother spoke of three days of horror – of children so wired with fear they couldn’t sleep, of captors coolly threatening to kill the hostages one by one, of a gymnasium so cramped there was hardly room to move.
“We were in complete fear,” Alla Gadieyeva, 24, said Friday as she lay collapsed in exhaustion on a stretcher outside a hospital. “People were praying all the time, and those that didn’t know how to pray – we taught them.”
Gadieyeva and her mother, Irina, were in the school courtyard Wednesday seeing off her son, Zaur, on his first day of school when they heard sounds like “balloons popping.”
She thought the noise was part of school festivities. But then five masked gunmen burst into the courtyard, shooting in the air and ordering people to get inside the building. Children, parents and teachers – Gadieyeva estimated there were about 1,000 in all – were corralled into a corner on the ground floor and then herded into the gymnasium.
Gadieyeva said children whimpered in fear, and all around there was screaming and crying. The hostages were forced to crouch, their hands folded over their heads.
For the rebels, the first order of business was confiscating cellphones. They smashed the phones, then delivered a warning: “If we find any mobile phones, we will shoot 20 people all around you.”
On the first day, people got a tiny bit of water to drink, but no food. After that, Gadieyeva said, nothing.
“When children began to faint, they laughed,” Gadieyeva said. “They were totally indifferent.”
She recounted how the hostage-takers eventually took off their masks. They had beards, long hair and spoke with Chechen accents, she said.
When children started to faint from thirst, the adults urged them to urinate. It was so they could drink their own urine, Gadieyeva said.
The gymnasium was quickly transformed into an arsenal of explosives – bombs dangling from the ceiling, set on the floor, strung up on walls. She said they seemed to be homemade, primitive packages containing bolts and nails.
“They’re not human beings,” Gadieyeva said. “What they did to us, I can’t understand.”
On Friday, early in the afternoon, explosions erupted without warning, both inside and outside the gym, she said. In the chaos, she couldn’t figure out how they were set off. Gunfire followed.
As the battle intensified, the rebels betrayed agitation for the first time.
“We’ll shoot until our guns stop,” a rebel announced. “And when our guns stop, we’ll blow up the building.”
The hostage-takers began pushing people out of the gym and into the basement. That created an opening for the hostages: They began breaking windows and fleeing. Some pushed children outside.
Gadieyeva said she helped her son and mother through a window. But she didn’t manage to get out.
For some reason, a 6-year-old boy whom she didn’t know was drawn to Gadieyeva. She held him in her arms. He clung to her, she said, “as if he would never let go.”
A group of hostages, including Gadieyeva and the boy, finally made a rush for a set of doors in the gymnasium. As they fled, she saw bodies of captives strewn on the floor as rebels fought with Russian security troops swarming around the school compound.
As Gadieyeva told her tale, townspeople kept coming up, asking her about the fate of their loved ones.
A man, about 20, asked Gadieyeva if she knew what had happened to one of the captives, a woman.
She’s dead, Gadieyeva replied.
The man bit his lip. He nodded.
And then he turned away.
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