Militants seize school and hold 400 hostages

About 17 attackers, both male and female, wore bomb belts.
BESLAN, Russia (AP) -- More than a dozen militants wearing suicide-bomb belts seized a southern Russian school in a region bordering Chechnya today, taking hostage about 400 people -- half of them children -- and threatening to blow up the building if police storm it. At least eight people have been killed, one of them a school parent.
In a tense standoff, Russian forces wearing camouflage and carrying heavy-caliber machine guns took up positions on the perimeter of Middle School No. 1 in the town of Beslan, 10 miles north of the regional capital of Vladikavkaz. About 1,000 people, mostly parents, were massed outside, demanding information and accusing the government of failing to protect their children.
The attack was the latest blamed on secessionist Chechen rebels, coming a day after a suicide bomber killed 10 people in the capital and a week after near-simultaneous explosions blamed on terrorists caused two Russian planes to crash, killing all 90 people on board. The surge in violence was apparently timed around last Sunday's Chechen presidential election.
President Vladimir Putin interrupted his working holiday today in the Black Sea resort of Sochi for a second time and returned to Moscow. On arrival at the airport, he held an immediate meeting with the heads of Russia's Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service, the Interfax news agency said.
First day of school
The standoff began after a ceremony marking the first day of the Russian school year, when it was likely that many parents had accompanied their children. About 17 militants, men and women, stormed the school and herded captives into the gymnasium. They forced children to stand at the windows and warned they would blow up the school if police intervened, said Alexei Polyansky, a police spokesman for southern Russia.
The ITAR-Tass news agency, citing local hospitals, reported that seven people died of injuries in the hospital and one was killed at the site during the seizure. Regional emergency workers told The Associated Press that two bodies were visible near the school, which has grades one through 11.
Fatima Khabalova, spokeswoman for the regional parliament, earlier said one of the dead was a father who brought his child to the school and was shot when he tried to resist the raiders. She also said at least nine people had been injured in gunfire after the hostage-taking, including three teachers and two police officers.
Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the region's Interior Ministry, said that the hostages have threatened "for every destroyed fighter, they will kill 50 children and for every injured fighter -- 20 [children]," the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
Some escape
At one point, a girl wearing a floral print dress and a red bow in her hair apparently fled from the school, her hand held by a flak-jacketed soldier. An older woman followed them. Ruslan Ayamov, spokesman for North Ossetia's Interior Ministry told The Associated Press that 12 children and one adult managed to escape after hiding in the building's boiler room.
"I was standing near the gates, music was playing, when I saw three armed people running with guns. At first I thought it was a joke when they fired in the air and we fled," a teenager, Zarubek Tsumartov, said on Russian television.
Suspicion in both the school attack and the Moscow bombing fell on Chechen rebels or their sympathizers, but there was no evidence of any direct link. "In essence, war has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front," Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said.
Presidential elections
The latest violence came around last Sunday's presidential elections in Chechnya, a Kremlin-backed move aimed at undermining support for the insurgents by establishing a modicum of civil order in the war-shattered republic. The previous Chechen president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed along with more than 20 others in a bombing May 9.
The militants inside the school released one hostage with a list of their demands, including the freedom of fighters detained over a series of attacks on police facilities in neighboring Ingushetia in June, ITAR-Tass reported.
They also seek talks with regional officials and a well-known pediatrician, Leonid Roshal, who aided hostages during the deadly seizure of a Moscow theater in 2002, news reports said.
Parents of the seized children recorded a videocassette appeal Putin to fulfill the terrorists' demands, Khabalova said. The text of the appeal was not immediately available.
The violence was the latest to plague the government of Putin, who came to power vowing to crush the Chechen rebellion.
Terrorism fears in Russia have risen markedly after the plane crashes and the suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday night. The blast, by a female attacker, tore through a busy area between the station and a department store, killing 10 people and wounding more than 50.
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