Russian forces storm school

BESLAN, Russia: Commandos stormed a school yesterday in southern Russia and battled separatist rebels holding hundreds of hostages as crying children, some naked and covered in blood, fled the building through explosions and gunfire. The Interfax news agency reported that more than 200 people died. Officials said 95 victims were identified — some 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. The figure could not be confirmed. Hundreds of hostages survived the more than two-day ordeal. More than 700 people were injured, officials said.

World governments angrily condemned the seizure of hostages at School Number 1 in Beslan, a town in the North Ossetia region, adjacent to warring Chechnya. US President George W Bush yesterday called it “another grim reminder of the length to which terrorists will go to threaten this civilized world.” Russian authorities said the hostage-takers initiated the bloody denouement by firing at captives who fled when explosions rang out as emergency workers were entering the school with the hostage-takers’ permission, to collect the bodies of slain hostages. An explosives expert told NTV television that the commandos charged into the building after bombs hung in school gym basketball hoops by the hostage-takers exploded. A sobbing young girl who escaped told NTV that a suicide bomber blew herself up in the gym where hostages had been held since the seizure Wednesday morning.

Twenty-seven militants were killed in gunfights with security forces yesterday, ten of them from Arab countries, Valery Andreyev, the region’s Federal Security Service chief, said in televised comments. Putin’s adviser on Chechnya, Aslanbek Aslakhanov, said nine of them were Arab mercenaries. News agencies later quoted officials as saying eight bodies had been found, but it was unclear whether those were in addition to the 20. After trading fire with militants holed up in the basement of a school annex, officials said that resistance from the militants was over but that three or four remained at large, Russian news agencies reported. But sporadic explosions and gunfire persisted after the reports, and an official at the crisis headquarters said two militants had been killed at or near the school, which was on fire, around midnight yesterday.

Officials said three suspected hostage-takers were arrested trying to escape — wearing civilian dress, according to some reports — 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 neighbouring 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. The ITAR-Tass news agency cited unspecified Russian security sources as saying that the school raid was financed by al-Qaida and masterminded by Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev.