ITAR-Tass, citing local hospitals, said one person died at the scene and seven in hospitals. Hours after the seizure, Regional Federal Security Service chief Valery Andreyev said on NTV television that negotiations with the hostage-takers "are just, just beginning" and that brief contact had not allowed authorities to evaluate the situation in Beslan, located 10 miles north of the regional capital of Vladikavkaz. At first I though it was a joke when they fired in the air and we fled," a teenager, Zarubek Tsumartov, said on Russian television. "I was standing near the gates, music was playing, when I saw three armed people running with guns.
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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. About 17 militants, men and women, stormed the three-story building and herded captives into the gymnasium. 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. 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. President Vladimir Putin interrupted his working holiday Wednesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi for a second time and returned to the capital. "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 surge in violence was apparently timed around last Sunday's Chechen presidential election. The attack was the latest blamed on secessionist Chechen rebels, coming a day after a suicide bomber killed nine people in Moscow and a week after near-simultaneous explosions blamed on terrorists caused two Russian planes to crash, killing all 90 people on board. 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. Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the North Ossetia 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.Īt one point, a girl wearing a floral print dress and a red bow in her hair fled the school, her hand held by a flak-jacketed soldier.
About 1,000 people, mostly parents, were massed the three-story building in the town of Beslan, demanding information and accusing the government of failing to protect their children. Russian special forces wearing camouflage and carrying heavy-caliber machine guns surrounded Middle School No. Hours into the desperate standoff, security officials said they had made brief contact with the hostage-takers.
The attackers claim the building is booby-trapped and put small children at windows to discourage Russian security forces from considering a shootout. The gunmen stormed in during a school-wide assembly and the deaths occurred in the chaos that followed.
It was the first day of classes at the school, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth. More than a dozen militants wearing suicide-bomb belts seized a southern Russian school in a region bordering Chechnya on Wednesday, taking hostage about 400 people - half of them children - and threatening to blow up the building if police storm it.