Posted on 09/03/2004 1:54:33 PM PDT by Nachum
BESLAN, Russia (AP) - Commandos stormed a school Friday in southern Russia and overcame separatist rebels holding hundreds of hostages as crying children, some naked and covered in blood, fled the building through explosions and gunfire. Health officials said more than 200 people died, the Interfax news agency reported.
Ninety-five victims were identified - many of them children whose shattered, bloodied bodies were placed on lines of stretchers - and Interfax quoted unnamed sources in the regional Health Ministry as saying more than 200 people were killed by fire from the militants or died from their wounds.
Hundreds of hostages survived the crisis, which in targeting children on the first day of classes crossed a boundary and amounted to a significant escalation in the decade-old Russian-Chechen conflict. More than 700 others were injured, officials said.
World governments angrily condemned the school seizure. U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday called it "another grim reminder of the length to which terrorists will go to threaten this civilized world."
Russian authorities insisted that the militants initiated Friday's violence as emergency teams entered the school, with the hostage-takers' permission, to collect the bodies of several men who had been executed earlier. It was not clear where the tragic end to the siege would leave President Vladimir Putin's tough policy on Chechnya, which to date had enjoyed broad support despite the heavy toll rebel violence has taken in recent years.
An explosives expert told NTV television that the commandos charged into the building after bombs - hung in basketball hoops by the hostage-takers - exploded. A sobbing young girl who escaped the school told NTV that a suicide bomber blew herself up in the gym where children were kept captive.
Twenty militants were killed in more than 10 hours of gunfights with security forces, 10 of them Arabs, Valery Andreyev, the region's Federal Security Service chief, said in televised comments. Putin's adviser on Chechnya, Aslanbek Aslakhanov, also said a number of the dead militants were Arab mercenaries.
After trading fire with militants holed up in the basement of a school annex, officials said the fighting was over, but that four militants remained at large. Three suspected hostage-takers were arrested trying to escape wearing civilian dress, Channel One TV reported, and Ekho Moskvy radio said a suspected female hostage-taker was detained when she approached an area hospital wearing a white robe.
The Arab presence among the attackers would bolster Putin's case that the Russian campaign in neighboring Chechnya, where mostly Muslim separatists have been fighting Russian forces in a brutal war for most of the past decade, is part of the war on international terrorism.
Late Friday, the ITAR-Tass new agency cited unspecified security sources as saying al-Qaida financed the attack on the school, and that Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev masterminded the raid. The report also said an alleged al-Qaida operative, Abu Omar as-Saif, coordinated the financing of the attack.
Regional President Alexander Dzasokhov said Friday that the hostage-takers had demanded that Russian troops leave Chechnya - the first clear indication of their demands and of a direct link between the attack on the school and the ongoing war in the neighboring region.
Officials at the crisis headquarters said 95 victims had been identified. Emergency Situations Ministry officials said 704 people were hospitalized, including 259 children. Many were badly burned.
Aslakhanov told Interfax the death toll could be "much more" than 150, and said in televised comments that the militants claimed they initially seized some 1,200 hostages, most of them children - far more than earlier estimates of 350.
The militants seized the school in North Ossetia on Wednesday, a day after a suicide bomb blast outside a Moscow subway station killed at least nine people, and just over a week after two Russian passenger jets crashed nearly simultaneously after what authorities believed were explosions on board triggered by suicide bombers, possibly Chechen women.
A hostage who escaped told Associated Press Television News that the militants numbered 28, including women in camouflage. The hostage, who identified himself only as Teimuraz, said the militants began wiring the school with explosives as soon as they took control Wednesday.
The commandos stormed the school on the third day of the crisis, moving in after about 30 women and children broke out of the building, some bloodied and screaming, after the explosions.
Russian officials said the violence came when - under an agreement reached Friday morning - emergency workers entered the school to retrieve the bodies of hostages who had been killed. A local legislator, Azamat Kadykov, had told the hostages' relatives that 20 adult men had been executed.
Andreyev said there were two large explosions, and people started running. He said militants fired at fleeing hostages, and security forces opened return fire, along with civilian residents of the town who had armed themselves. The police sapper, speaking on NTV television, said bombs hanging from basketball hoops exploded.
The bomb expert said the gym had also been rigged with explosives packed in plastic bottles strung up around the room on a cord and stuffed with metal objects.
Women escaping the building were seen fainting and others, some covered in blood, were carried away on stretchers. Many children - parched, hungry and only partly clothed because of the stifling heat in the gym - ran out screaming and begging for water.
"They didn't let me go to the toilet for three days, not once. They never let me drink or go to the toilet," Teimuraz, the escaped hostage, told APTN.
Two emergency services workers were killed and three wounded during the chaos, Interfax reported.
Interfax said the school's roof collapsed, possibly from the explosives. The militants had reportedly threatened to blow up the building if authorities used force. Andreyev and Aslakhanov said there had been no plans to storm the school and that authorities had pinned hopes on negotiations.
Putin had said Thursday that everything possible would be done to end the "horrible" crisis and save the lives of the children and other hostages in this town of 35,000 people.
I agree.
And above all, everyone who wants a more "sensitive" war on terror, raise your hands.
Jihadist vermin are vermin, regardless of their origins. They should be put down like the rabid beasts that they arte.
If you want to tell me that you've 20 dead guys and 10 of these are Arabs, all you have to say is:
''Twenty militants, 10 of them Arabs, were killed...etc.''
Putting the modifying clause at the end of the sentence, when what you intend to modify with it is at the very beginning of the sentence, is an hopelessly ungrammatical usage, needlessly unclear, and can (and will) create confusion in a large number of cases, as here. If (for some curious reason) you DID want to specify the ethnicity of the security forces, you would indeed write the sentence in this fashion. ''10 of them Arabs'', as placed, unquestionably is a modifier for ''forces''.
The Russians did the best they could with the awful circumstances. What theyt should do now is reopen the camps in Siberia, reinforce the walls, add electrification and rename it Chechnya.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/09/03/russia.school/index.html
Hmmm. Jihading Arabs in Russia. Surprise, surprise....
That would be because North Ossetia is primarily Muslim...
South Ossettia is primarily Christian..
You don't have to believe me.. Check the facts yourself..
I did..
Those Muslims are just violent. They are just proof that Nazis never died, they just went somewhere else. Muslims are the Nazis of today. Adolf Hitler would be very proud today.
I am at a loss of words for this horrific evil.
I'm increasingly concerned that we will see them here next. We have a lot of intelligence indicating they want to disrupt and influence the November elections. Between now and November 2, don't ride public transportation unless it's absolutely necessary.
Here is a man who knows where most of his true allies live. His allies live here in America.
I'm confused.
"The Ossetian population of North Ossetia is predominantly Christian with a Muslim minority, ..."
I have long believed the next superpower alliance will be America and Russia.
*Any pity I ever felt for the Chechens is gone now*
You and me both--I agree 100%.
IMO, we need to start from the top and work down. First, identify and kill every leader. Then the sub-commanders. Then the rest. Destroy their towns and cities. Every mosque in the world should be fire-bombed. Mecca should go first, blasted by a minimum 15M megaton hydrogenbomb, followed by the rest of the "holy" cities, all bastions of evil. Those who try to interfere should be killed on site. If and when they stand down, then so will we. Perhaps after 10-20 million of them have been justly killed, the rest will stand down. If not, keep killing them until they are all gone.
My guess is the Russian body recovery team was a pretext for a rescue team insertion. The standard protocol for any hostage rescue team in the world is that when hostages die, real negotiations are over. "Negotiators" may continue to talk, but only to buy time or gather intel before the inevitable arrives in a series of flash-bangs and sub-machine gun bursts.
Unfortunately, the terrorists anticipated this. However, there was nothing that could have been done differently. Once they start killing hostages, there is no other option but to go in shooting, despite the potential for losses among the hostages.
I submitted this to a number of newspapers, so watch for it to be published...
In light of recent events, combined with events over the past few years post 9/11, I have
looked studiously and come up empty on one critical matter concerning terrorism committed by Islamic radicals, and come up with a continiuously unanswered question? Where is the outrage? To be sure, there is some criticism by a few token Muslim clerics here in the United States to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but there has been no public denunciations by rank and file Imams and Mullahs, no condemnations of actions, whether it be those perpetrated against the United States, recent hostage takings of French journalists in Iraq, suicide bombings in Israel, or the recent atrocities committed by Chechen rebels in Russia against innocent men, women and children, on land and in the air, and no SCATHING CONDEMNATIONS from any muslim cleric. Where is the outrage, where are the condemnations?
The answer is quite simple, there is none. As a Catholic, if someone of the same religion as I had perpetrated acts like bombing mosques or shooting up Muslim schools, anywhere in the world, it would be rapidly condemned by not only local Catholic clergy, it would be condemned by the Holy See itself, and condemnations against such atrocities would ring out in sermons at Masses the world over for weeks. Muslim clerics and lay people need to learn that if they don't start condemning these atrocities, and continue their silence when such atrocities happen, they will, far from being a solution to the problem, will present themselves as the problem for all civilized nations.
3 terrorists were captured. I sure hope they die long, painful, agonizing horrific deaths. Hopefully they'll pull out the old KGB methods stuff.
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