Attackers wearing suicide-bomb belts seized a school in Ossetia yesterday and were holding hundreds of hostages, reportedly including 200 children. The assault came a day after a suicide bomber killed 10 people in Moscow.
The hostage-takers reportedly released 15 children several hours later, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. But Ruslan Ayamov, spokesman for North Ossetia's Interior Ministry, denied that the hostage-takers had freed anyone, telling reporters that 12 children and one adult managed to escape earlier yesterday after hiding in the building's boiler room.
During the seizure, at least two people were killed, including a father who had brought his child to the school and was shot when he tried to resist the raiders, said Fatima Khabolova, a spokeswoman for the regional parliament. A raider also was killed and nine people were injured, she said.
The seizure began after a ceremony marking the first day of the Russian school year, reports said, when it was likely that many parents had accompanied their children to the school which covers grades 1 through 11. The attackers warned they would blow up the school if police tried to storm it and forced children to stand at the windows, said Alexei Polyansky, a police spokesman for southern Russia.
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.
Parents of the seized children recorded a videocassette appeal to President Vladimir Putin to fulfill the terrorists' demands, Khabalova said. The text of the appeal was not immediately available.
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. The two strikes came just a week after two Russian planes carrying 90 people crashed almost simultaneously in what officials also say were terrorist bombings.
"In essence, war has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front," Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said.
The latest violence also appears to be timed 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 on May 9.
Gunfire broke out after the school raid and at least three teachers and two police officers were wounded, Polyansky said. More gunfire and several explosions were heard about three hours later, the Interfax news agency reported.
Polyansky said most of the attackers were wearing suicide bomb belts.
The attackers demanded talks with regional officials and a well-known pediatrician, Leonid Roshal, who had aided hostages during the seizure of a Moscow theater in 2002, news reports said. At least 129 hostages died in that incident, most from effects of a knockout gas pumped into the building, and 41 attackers were reported killed.
The hostage-takers at the school demanded the release of fighters detained over a series of attacks on police facilities in neighboring Ingushetia in June, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, citing regional officials. Those well-coordinated raids killed more than 90 people.
RSS