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MOSCOW, Sept 1: A heavily armed gang seized up to 400 hostages at a Russian school near Chechnya on Wednesday and threatened to kill 50 children for any member of their group killed.
Russian officials started negotiations late in the night with the gang of 17 men and women who stormed into the secondary school in Beslan, in North Ossetia province, during a morning ceremony to mark the first day of the new school year.
The assault was the latest in a recent spate of deadly attacks in Russia which have killed more than 100 people. As dusk fell there were no signs of any end to the siege around the low brick building.
Hundreds of armed security officials surrounded the school. Armoured vehicles were stationed nearby. "They have said that for every fighter wiped out they will kill 50 children and for every fighter wounded - 20," regional Interior Minister Kazbek Dzantyev told reporters in Beslan. North Ossetia lies to the west of the seething Chechnya region where Russian forces have been battling guerillas for a decade.
PUTIN SILENT: Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose hardline tactics over Chechnya helped bring him to power in 2000, has said nothing in public since the attack.
The mass hostage-taking targeting this time a school, marks, however, a new challenge and raises the level of violence in Russia. Earlier in the day, Mr Putin broke off his seaside holiday to rush back to Moscow, immediately dispatching his interior minister and head of the FSB security service to Beslan.
The gang, some strapped with explosives and reported to have mined the school grounds, later set free 15 of the children. At least eight civilians were killed in the attack - seven of them dying of wounds in hospital. Nearly 50 children had managed to escape.
Witnesses near the school said sporadic gunfire resounded throughout the day and there was at least one loud unexplained bang from inside the school. "Every gunshot I hear is like a shot into my heart," said one woman, Vera, tears pouring down her cheeks and whose child was among the hostages.
There was confusion over the exact number of hostages, but local police eventually put the number at between 300 and 400. Itar-Tass said 132 children were among the hostages.
SECURITY COUNCIL: In a surprise move, Russia called for a UN Security Council meeting on "terrorist acts" in the country. Moscow has for years doggedly rejected any outside role, and criticism of its own role, in Chechnya, insisting it was a domestic affair.
But recently, Russian officials have been pointing more to foreign involvement in the attacks, possibly linked to Al Qaeda. On Tuesday, a female suicide bomber blew herself up in central Moscow in an attack that killed 10 and injured 50.
A week earlier, two passenger planes were blown up apparently by suicide bombers, killing 90 people and which officials say were almost certainly linked to Chechen guerillas.
The wave of attacks raises questions over Mr Putin's hardline strategy to bring Chechen fighters to heel, but in the past he has shown no signs of buckling to their pressure.
HUGE LOSS OF LIFE: Previous hostage-taking involving Chechen guerillas, seeking withdrawal of Russian troops from their region, have all ended with huge loss of life. -Reuters
