Hundreds Held Hostage at School in Russia

Many Children Seized In Town Near Chechnya

An image taken from TV shows a soldier rushing a girl away from the school in Beslan, in the region of North Ossetia. The guerrillas attacked on the first day of the school year. (Reuters Television)

BESLAN, Russia, Sept. 2 -- Heavily armed guerrillas, some of them wearing explosive belts, stormed into a school in southern Russia near the separatist region of Chechnya on Wednesday morning and took several hundred students, teachers and parents hostage after a deadly shootout.

Striking right after opening-day ceremonies for the new academic year, the attackers threatened to blow up the school if the Russian government attempted to retake it and said they would execute 50 hostages for every one of their own killed.

As many as seven adults died in an initial shootout at School No. 1 in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, just west of the Chechen border, authorities said. Gunfire and explosions rang out in the area throughout the day and into the night, after Russian troops surrounded the school.

The raid came as Russians were still absorbing the carnage of three other bombings elsewhere in the country during the past week -- the downing of two airliners and a suicide attack in Moscow that together killed about 100 people. Russian authorities have blamed Chechen separatists for those attacks.

Nearly 24 hours into the siege in Beslan, anxious parents continued to hold vigil at the local House of Culture. The auditorium there was a study in a state of grief, with deadened, drawn faces of women who had cried themselves out and men bristling with barely suppressed anger. Some families had four or five children at the school; an 11-month-old was also on the list circulating among the parents. As many as 885 children are registered at the school, which comprises Grades 1 through 11.

Just before news of the school seizure broke, President Vladimir Putin said Chechen terrorists linked to al Qaeda were responsible for the recent outbreak of violence and vowed not to negotiate with them. "We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them," he said before flying back to Moscow from vacation on the Black Sea for the second time in a week.

"War has been declared on us," added Putin's defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, "where the enemy is unseen and there is no front."

At Russia's request, the U.N. Security Council called an emergency meeting Wednesday in New York to discuss the latest spasm of Chechen-related terrorism. At the meeting, the council condemned "in the strongest terms" the attack on the school and demanded "the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages." President Bush phoned Putin to offer support and told him the United States was fighting "side by side" with Russia in the war on terror, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

By nightfall, the town of Beslan, with a population of 30,000, had settled into a tense standoff, with the school surrounded by hundreds of Russian troops, armored vehicles and parents desperate for information about their children trapped inside. But there was no encouraging news for them, just a police officer who told the frantic relatives via bullhorn about the hostage takers' demands.

"The only thing they said was that they would kill 50 hostages for each one of them killed, 20 for each wounded. If the storming begins, the whole school would be blown up. That's all we can say for the moment," the officer said on the bullhorn in a scene later broadcast on television across Russia.

The attack began about 9 a.m. when a large group of guerrillas rolled up in a military-style truck and charged into the school as the opening-day ceremony was ending in the gym. At least two of the attackers were women wearing explosive belts. Some local police immediately resisted the intruders, exchanging fire with them.

Taimuraz Pukhayev, who lives across from the school, saw the attack start. His wife had just taken his three children -- ages 7, 11, and 12 -- to class when he heard shooting. He ran outside and saw about half a dozen camouflage-clad guerrillas and two women rushing toward the building. "I saw them breaking the doors, the windows. I heard children screaming," he said. Then a guerrilla with an automatic rifle started shooting at him. "They shot at me, then they noticed [a neighbor] and shot at him. I saw him bleeding from the head." The neighbor later died.

Some children ran to safety in the initial confusion. "I thought it was a joke, but they began to shoot in the air and we ran," said one breathless boy shown on Russia's NTV television network.

For Elza Baskayeva, editor of the local newspaper, a fearful wait began when she heard shooting and called her 27-year-old daughter, who was at the school taking pictures for the paper. "She was crying, 'They are shooting! They are shooting! We are on the second floor.' And then I lost the connection," Baskayeva said in a telephone interview. Baskayeva went to her office a few hundred yards away and learned that two other employees and their children had also been taken hostage.