It is not clear how many hostages are free
Posted on 09/03/2004 3:36:01 AM PDT by yankeedame
Last Updated: Friday, 3 September, 2004, 10:01 GMT 11:01 UK
Battle erupts at Russian school
It is not clear how many hostages are free
Heavy gunfire and explosions have engulfed the school in North Ossetia, where hundreds of children and adults are being held hostage. A large number of people have been seen fleeing the premises, many of them covered in blood.
The hostage takers apparently tried to escape the school building together with some of the hostages as soldiers fired on them.
Helicopters hovered overhead and there were troops everywhere.
Parts of the school are reported to have been blown up, the BBC's Sarah Rainsford reported, and a section of the roof appears to have collapsed.
Pandemonium
People could be seen running from the building - some of them semi-naked - as a thick pall of black smoke hovered overhead.
There is pandemonium in the streets surrounding the school, says the BBC's Damian Grammaticas, who is also at the scene.
The armed group which is holding the hostages were earlier reported to have demanded independence for neighbouring Chechnya.
On Thursday, 26 women and young children were released, and some of them provided the first details of conditions inside the school.
"You know there are not 300 people in there, but altogether 1,500. People are lying on top of each other," 27-year-old teacher Zalina Dzandarova told the Kommersant newspaper.
RECENT DEADLY ATTACKS
-31 Aug 2004 - Suicide bomb kills 10 at north Moscow train station
-24 Aug 2004 - Two planes crash after leaving same Moscow airport, killing 89
-May 2004 - Chechen president killed in blast at stadium in Grozny
-Feb 2004 - Bomb attack kills at least 39 people on Moscow underground
-Dec 2003 - Female suicide bomber kills five near Moscow's Red Square
"They took some of the injured out of the gym and finished them off right there in the corridor," she said.
Officials put the number of hostages at 354 before Thursday's release, although the school has more than 1,000 pupils.
The hostage takers had been refusing to allow food, water and medicine into the building.
Trip wires were believed to have been laid around the school, with the attackers threatening to blow it up if it was stormed by police.
Hundreds of relatives of those being held inside the school who had been waiting anxiously outside the security cordon reacted in panic to the outbreak of fighting.
Officials said the release of the 26 people on Thursday came after mediation efforts by the former President of the neighbouring region of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev.
First school day
The attackers - both men and women, some wearing bomb belts - struck on Wednesday, the first day of the new school year in Russia.
Click for a detailed map of Beslan
Enlarge Map
Many parents and other relatives were inside the school, helping their children celebrate the new year, when the assault began.
President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that everything would be done to save the lives of the hostages.
In his first public comments on the crisis, more than 24 hours after it began, President Putin said: "Our main task is, of course, to save the lives and health of those who became hostages.
"All actions of our forces working on the hostages' release will be devoted and be subject to this task exclusively."
The school crisis came a day after a suspected suicide bombing in Moscow killed 10 people. Last week, the mid-air explosions of two passenger planes left 89 dead.
1 - Main entrance
2 - Area where gunfire began
3 - Hostages are being held in the school gym, which has reportedly been packed with explosives and mines
4 - Side entrance
5 - There have been reports of children being used as human shields at the back windows
6 - As the attack began a number of people hid in the boiler room and later escaped
CNNfn/International is doing far better coverage of this than FNC is today....
Fox can't be any worse than MSNBC--they've got Imus on.
Pretty serious act of war. I find it so strange that Islamics will infiltrate to the middle of a country to attack children. One would think that they could have found a much better military target in all that distance.
But then it is hard to fathom the level of depravity that Islam causes in men.
Truly a war with Islam is a rightous one!
A boy cries as he sits in a car with his relatives after he was released from the school seized by heavily armed masked men and women in the town of Beslan in the province of North Ossetia near Chechnya (news - web sites), September 3, 2004. Russian soldiers battled Chechen separatists on Friday to end a two-day-old school siege as naked children ran out screaming amid explosions and machinegun fire. REUTERS/Viktor Korotayev
I will guarantee, Bush came off his tour de force tonight and when given the news, called Putin as a friend and understanding confidant and has stayed close to the news.
"Feel Good" victories are short lived amongst leaders fighting enemies of terror and evil during World War IV.
The name given to these criminals, "Chechen separatists" is far too noble given what they've just done to innocent school children!
These so-called "separatists" are actually more of the same evil we've been dealing with the world over: Islamic terrorists.
What the BBC is calling Chechen separatists, are in fact muslim terrorists, are they not?
I think Chechnya is about half and half..
( Orthodox Russian Catholic and Muslim.. )
They stripped the rescued adults AND children down to the "panties" level to ensure the 8th seven-year old little girl wasnt' wired by the Islamist punks with explosives to kill the other seven little seven-year old girls and her 300 rescuers.
This crap that they are not murderous Islamists ... but politically motivated "separatists" ... is not to be believed.
Putin and his gutless functionaries need to step up. Their anti-American machinations in the U.N. and overtly absent support in Iraq don't seem to be working.
Bring on the historic Russkie warrior class Vladdie. Join your only historic betters. Let's kill these punks.
Heartwrenching. I've run out of words.
Muslims need to find easier targets they can handle, other than grammer school kids. Maybe the next target for Muslim heros would be the 'newborn's' section of a hospital. Worse than cowards.
Do you mean the Catholics may be participating in these terrorist acts?
I'm going out on a limb here but I don't think that's what Drammach meant. I believe Drammach was supplying background info on the area.
I believe there are a number of ethnic Slavs in Chechnya who may represent the Christian minority to which you refer. But I believe the ethnic Chechnyans are Muslims.
According to a newspaper account I read today, an interim Chechnyan government was allowed to exist briefly by Putin, but the leader instituted Islamic Law and then attempted to export it to Dagestan.Make no mistake about this - its Islamic terrorism all over again. Like the Palestinian situation, it may be clouded over with some elements of local nationalism, but its the same story - militant Islam on the march again.
Chechnya's population may be mixed but it is solely the Islamofascists who are doing these things.
We shouldn't be so self- righteous here.
The same conditions are being created HERE by our OWN government.
Recently, there was a "lottery" to select at random thousands of individuals to nationalize as American citizens. The countries from which these individuals were selected were selected on the basis of being "under-represented" in our population.
Guess what one of the major countries was. Egypt.
That's right. The U.S. government is giving preferential treatment over Chinese, Irishmen, etc. to EGYPTIANS!!! The same kind of people who constituted the larger elements of the 9-1-1 kooks.
Every Mosque, every Madrasseh on U.S. and western soil is a blemish on the face of western civlization.
The slience from the world Islamic community over what is going on in that school in Russia is deafening. And what happened there, can and WILL happen here, once the critical mass of Muslims in the U.S. reaches the combustion point.
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