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Russia hostage drama pins hopes on talks
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-02 08:42
Gunmen held hundreds of children and adults captive in a school gym into the
night in turbulent southern Russia Thursday, but the Kremlin remained silent
about an attack amounting to a huge humiliation.
Officials in North Ossetia, a province near unruly Chechnya, were trying to
build contacts with 17 attackers who herded pupils, parents and teachers into
the gym after bursting into a ceremony marking the start of a new school year
Wednesday.
Soldiers and armored cars waited in darkness in adjacent streets. Officials
said the gunmen had refused an offer to deliver food and water for the children
aged between 7 and 17.
The assault by the gang, which according to some accounts included women
trained as suicide bombers, bore the signs of a Chechen rebel operation. It was
the latest in a recent spate of deadly attacks in Russia which have killed more
than 100.
Russian soldiers rescue an unidentified child
in North Ossetia Wednesday morning Sept. 1, 2004. More than a dozen
attackers carrying guns and wrapped in suicide-bomb belts seized a school
in the Russian region of North Ossetia Wednesday morning and were holding
hundreds of hostages, including some 200 children, news reports said.
[AP] |
It remained unclear who the attackers
were. Chechen separatist leaders denied any links. Officials said contacts had
been opened, but gave no details.
"Sometimes it is quiet and then they start firing again. Soldiers keep going
back and forth," said Nikolai Dzaparov, whose 2-1/2-year-old grand-daughter was
inside after attending the ceremony in the two-story brick building.
"No one tells us anything. Some people say there are up to 400 hostages. Some
people say the terrorists are Chechens. Some people say they are Arabs. But we
don't know."
Initial reports from the small provincial town of low-rise houses said the
attackers had demanded the release of insurgents jailed after a June raid in
Ingushetia, a region bordering Chechnya. But there was no official confirmation
of this.
Officials said the gang had threatened to kill 50 children for any one of
their comrades killed and to blow up the mined school if attacked.
The official numbers of hostages varied greatly between 120 and 400 and it
was not clear how many were children.
Exhausted relatives milled about a cultural center, women in brightly-colored
skirts, men with short dark hair, many smoking to pass the time.
Official statements said the gunmen wanted to speak with the presidents of
Ingushetia and North Ossetia and prominent pediatrician Leonid Roshal.
Doctor gears for talks
Interfax news agency said Roshal, who helped win the release of children when
Chechen rebels seized nearly 700 hostages in a Moscow theater in 2002, was in
Beslan trying to get in touch with the militants.
President Vladimir Putin broke off his seaside holiday and rushed to Moscow
to grapple with the mounting attacks that deal a blow to his security policies.
But Putin, whose hard-line tactics over Chechnya helped propel him to power
in 2000, has said nothing in public about either the school attack or a bomb
explosion at a Moscow underground station Tuesday which killed nine people.
A week earlier, two passenger planes were blown up apparently by suicide
bombers, killing 90 people. Officials say they were almost certainly linked to
Chechen rebels.
In a surprise move, Russia called for a U.N. Security Council meeting on
"terrorist acts" in the country.
Moscow has for years rejected any outside role and criticism of its own role
in Chechnya, insisting it was a domestic affair. But Russian officials have
recently been pointing more to foreign involvement in the attacks, possibly
linked to al Qaeda.
Putin and U.S. President Bush discussed the string of attacks in Russia by
telephone.
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