BESLAN, Russia – Sporadic gunfire rang out Thursday from a school where armed militants held hundreds of children and adults hostage, but the attackers released 26 women and children, and Russian officials conducted their first face-to-face negotiations with the guerrillas in an attempt to end the crisis.
As thousands of family members milled in tense uncertainty outside the cordon around the North Ossetia middle school, there were fears that the two-day standoff would end in violence. More than two dozen attackers, who have mined the school with explosives and strapped bomb belts to their waists, have vowed to blow up the school if attacked.
One freed hostage, Zalina Dzandarova, 27, said there were not 354 hostages, as Russian officials had estimated, but more than 1,000 crowded into the school gym in stifling heat, no water and little food. Dzandarova said two female guerrillas blew themselves up Wednesday and 10 men had been taken out of the gym and shot.
Lev Dzugayev, an aide to the president of North Ossetia, said authorities saw seven bodies in the courtyard outside the school, all males believed to have been killed during the initial seizure. Some of the corpses had been thrown out of windows, he said.
A senior Russian security official said authorities were faced with a dilemma even worse than the 2002 seizure of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow by Chechen militants. The siege led to the deaths of 129 hostages and 41 guerrillas when Russian troops pumped a gas into the theater before storming in.
“The situation is much worse than Dubrovka. Believe me, much worse,” said the official. “It seems almost certain that the hostage-takers are not really interested in negotiations or any demands. So far, we haven’t gotten any coherent statement of what they really want.
“They are just biding their time, as if waiting for us to start storming this school, and then they will blow everything up. I think they are ready to blow themselves up, together with the hostages, in any case. It seems to be their one and only plan.”
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