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.
This will be coming to America if the people of this country are stupid enough to elect John Kerry as our next President. Pass it on...especially to women.
When you made your submission, I hope you used paragraph breaks.
Thank you for finding the OKC photo. That photo is absolutely one of the most influential in my experience.
I'm not embarrassed to say that photo can make me shed tears as easily today as it did years ago.
The kind of primitive apes, seen in the first Part of 2001: Space Odyssey.
Well, I am having trouble keeping track of all of the papers, but here's some of them
New York Post
Park City Daily News (local paper in Bowling Green, KY)
Louisville Courier-Journal
Lexington Herald-Leader
Paducah Sun
Nashville Tennessean
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New Orleans Times-Picayune
Arkansas Democrat-Gazzette
Chicago Sun-Times
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Washington Times
Count on it.
The Russians need to repay these butchers for their barbary.
I haven't seen more mutilated, murdered bodies since the photos of the "experiments" Hitler "commissioned" on his POWs.
The majority religion in North Ossetia is Russian Orthodox Christian, and several of its neighbors are predominantly Muslim. The region is awash in political, religious and ethnic hatred.
Russian troops had to step in to quell a 1992 conflict between North Ossetians and largely-Muslim Ingush, longtime ethnic rivals. - http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9903/20/russia.bombing/
Excellent point & well said.
A meteorite could never inspire such evil that we see unleashed today --- allah is Satan himself --- the Evil One, the evil takes on different forms -- Nazism, Communism -- at least certain forms of it, and Islam.
C.A.I.R. is busy reading any article or speech coming out out this slaughter of children and if any criticism of the Arabs behind it is made, C.A.I.R. will suddenly spring to life and claim it's just about anti-Arab racism that the world is horrified by this.
They are to busy having parties celebrating the death of the Russian infidel children right now. I'm sure they will get around to "condemning" this horror pretty soon!
I know that our good President has no choice but to say it, but it is NOT a religion of peace. I think most Muslims are just average people who want food in their belly, a roof over their head, and a better life for their children, but the tenets of their religion force them to yield (if only in silent acquiescence) to the extremists who take the religion literally and seriously.
I just went over the CAIR's website and unless someone else can find it, nothing from them about the terrorism. Not a word.
I am not a teacher, but most of the ones I do know abhor violence. Also, 20 terrorists that have automatic weapons and explosives in your face must be different than a arab with a box-cutter. If they told the adult male hostages to be still or the children would die then I would do it also.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.