The lone positive development for a peaceful settlement came late in the afternoon Thursday when the guerrillas allowed a mediator, former Ingushetia president Ruslan Aushev, to enter the school. He emerged little more than an hour later, at about 4:30 p.m., accompanied by several infants and their mothers.
At least one of the children was naked, held by a distraught woman. Another toddler was carried into a waiting car by a gray-haired military officer, who kissed the child on the cheek before handing him off. A tattooed soldier in a sleeveless camouflage vest ran toward the car with a third, nearly naked child, who was then wrapped in a red-flowered blanket hastily offered by a bystander.
Later, authorities said 26 hostages had been released, though Russian media reported that one woman returned to be with her older children. "This is the first positive step," Dzugaev said. But other officials were less sanguine. "It's not a sign of anything," said Dmitri Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman.
So far, Russians have relied on two mediators -- Aushev, an Afghan war veteran, and Leonid Roshal, a children's doctor in Moscow who played a similar role during the 2002 theater siege there.
"Of course the release of 26 people is a victory, but speaking broadly, it's really so few," Roshal told reporters. From 4 p.m. Wednesday to 3 a.m. Thursday, he was negotiating on the phone with the guerrillas, who refused his entreaties to allow in food and medicine. They also rebuffed a Russian offer to allow them safe passage in return for freeing the children, and they refused to consider swapping child hostages for adult volunteers.
Roshal, who resumed contact with the guerrillas later Thursday, warned that failure to reach a deal would be catastrophic. "In the event of an unfavorable outcome, there will be war," he said. "A war here, in this dangerous region, a war between fraternal peoples."
The overture to Zakayev came in a joint phone call Thursday night from Aushev and Alexander Dzasokhov, president of North Ossetia, Zakayev said. Zakayev represents separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected president during Chechnya's de facto independence in the late 1990s. He said he discussed possible ways to include Maskhadov in the negotiation process.
Russian officials publicly seemed to rule out an attempt to retake the building. "There is no alternative to dialogue," Valery Andreyev, the regional head of the Federal Security Service, told reporters. "One should expect long and tense negotiations."
But Russia's recent history with such mass hostage-takings led relatives and security experts alike to fear that the siege would end in mass casualties. By Thursday evening, the military had widened the security cordon around the school, closing off additional blocks of residential housing and positioning tanks near the building.
Those moves came at the end of a long day of frayed nerves in Beslan, and the town was frequently jarred by gunfire and explosions coming from the school. In the afternoon, the guerrillas fired rocket-propelled grenades, setting a car on fire. They did so again overnight Friday, reportedly injuring a police officer.
In the streets of the town of 30,000, many people were openly angry. "They should make concessions," Oleg Karginov, whose niece was in the school, said of the government. But he quickly added about the guerrillas: "They have to be captured. They're just walking meat, not humans. What they've done with these children, even a wolf wouldn't do that to another wolf."
Glasser reported from Moscow.
