Blasts rock area by school, hostages

A night of negotiations with the militants ended up with no resolution yet.
BESLAN, Russia (AP) -- Two explosions rocked the area around a school where heavily armed militants, some strapped with bombs, were holed up for a second day today with about 350 hostages, including many children, in southern Russia.
The explosions came about 10 minutes apart, from the vicinity of the school, followed by a cloud of black smoke. No further details were available and it was impossible to see exactly what happened because police had cordoned off the area.
The cause of the explosions was not clear. The militants who stormed the school Wednesday had threatened to blow it up if Russian forces launched an assault to free the hostages -- but there was no sign that any operation or battle was under way.
Earlier today, Valery Andreyev, the Federal Security Service's chief in North Ossetia, seemed to rule out the immediate use of force.
"There is no alternative to dialogue," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted him as saying. "One should expect long and tense negotiations."
Fruitless negotiations
Russian officials had negotiated fruitlessly through the night to end the standoff. Crowds of distraught relatives and townspeople waited helplessly for news of their loved ones, and before the blasts, gunfire occasionally rattled from the area.
Earlier today, in his first public comment on the raid, President Vladimir Putin pledged to do everything possible to save the lives of the hundreds of hostages.
"We understand these acts are not only against private citizens of Russia but against Russia as a whole," Putin said in comments broadcast on Russian television during a Kremlin meeting with Jordan King Abdullah II. "What is happening in North Ossetia is horrible."
"It's horrible not only because some of the hostages are children but because this action can explode even a fragile balance of interconfessional and international relations in the region."
The school in Beslan, a town of about 30,000, is in North Ossetia, near the republic of Chechnya where separatist rebels have been fighting Russian forces since 1999. Suspicion in the raid fell on Chechen militants although no claim of responsibility has been made.
Recent bombings
The raid came a day after a suspected Chechen suicide bomber blew herself up outside a Moscow subway station, killing nine people, and just over a week after 90 people died in two plane crashes that are suspected to have been blown up by suicide bombers also linked to Chechnya.
The recent bloodshed is a blow to Putin, who pledged five years ago to crush Chechnya's rebels but instead has seen the insurgents increasingly strike civilian targets beyond the republic's borders.
Heavily armed militants wearing masks descended on Middle School No. 1 shortly after 9 a.m. on the opening day of the new school year Wednesday. About a dozen people managed to escape by hiding in a boiler room, but hundreds of others were herded into the school gymnasium and some were placed at windows as human shields.
Little was known about food and sanitary condition inside the school; offers to deliver food and water to the school were turned down.
Camouflage-clad special forces troops carrying assault rifles encircled the school, while the militants placed a sniper on an upper floor of the three-story building.
Awaiting information
More than 1,000 people, including many parents, crowded outside police cordons demanding information and accusing the government of failing to protect their children.
Andreyev, the Federal Security Service's chief in North Ossetia, said on NTV television that elders from Chechnya and Ingushetia had offered to come to the school and act as stand-in hostages so that women and children could be released.
He also said that some of the militants had been identified, and investigators were attempting to find their relatives and bring them to the school to help in the negotiations. Two Arab television stations had also offered to negotiate, Andreyev said.
"Negotiations are continuing," he said.
Militants' threat
From inside the school, the militants sent out a list of demands and threatened that if police intervened, they would kill 50 children for every hostage-taker killed and 20 children for every hostage-taker injured, Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the North Ossetia region's Interior Ministry, was quoted as telling the ITAR-Tass news agency. An aide to the North Ossetian president, Lev Dzugayev, estimated there were between 15 and 24 militants.
How the police could end the standoff without a storming the building was unclear. The Moscow theater hostage-taking ended after an unidentified knockout gas was pumped into the building, but the gas was responsible for almost all of the 129 hostage deaths.
Gennady Gudkov, a retired Federal Security Service colonel and a member of the Russian parliament's defense committee, said there is little chance that authorities will resort to a knockout gas this time -- particularly since medical experts said it tended to have a stronger effect on children.
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