Details began to emerge Sunday as to what may have driven the school siege militants, as yet unidentified, to commit such a horrifying act against children. Witnesses reported that the hostage-takers had attempted to justify their brutality by claiming it was an act of revenge for the killing by Russian forces of Chechen children.
Margarita Komoyeva, a physics teacher released the day before the terrible climax in Beslan, said: "One of them told me: `Russian soldiers are killing our children in Chechnya, so we are here to kill yours.'"
The words were amplified yesterday on a Web site that is close to Shamil Basayev, the most extreme Chechen commander whom Russian officials think was the mastermind behind the Beslan atrocity.
"However many children in that school were held hostage, however many of them will die [and have already died] ... it is incomparably less than the 42,000 Chechen children of school age who have been killed by Russian invaders", said the statement on www.kavkazcenter.org.
Three people have been detained in Beslan suspected of aiding and abetting the attackers. Earlier, the regional emergency situations minister, Boris Dzgoyev, said 35 militants had taken part in the attack and that all of them had been killed in 10 hours of fighting.
The fact that women took part in the Beslan raid added another sign of the brutalization of the Chechen war over the last two years. The Russian tabloid media, which is heavily influenced by the Kremlin, has made much of the so-called "black widows."
Cerwyn Moore, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, said it was true that around 60 percent of the 15 or 20 confirmed suicide bombers had lost husbands.
It was possible some Chechen women on raids were seeking revenge for being raped by Russian troops, he said. "There has been widespread use of war rape by contract soldiers .... But when you have Russian contract soldiers looting and raping -- and I believe it's the accepted norm -- you're going to have things happen later."
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