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[BethMac]

200 children held hostage in Russian school

Last Updated Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:49:55 EDT

MOSCOW - Around 400 people, including 200 children are being held hostage in a sourthern Russian town bordering Chechnya after attackers, some wearing suicide-bomb belts, seized an elementary school Wednesday.

Russian soldiers rescue a child in North Ossetia, Russia Wednesday morning. (AP photo)
At least two people were reported killed, one a parent who resisted an attacker.

Fifty people were able to escape after they hid in the boiler room and fled as the armed militants took over the building.

Hostage-takers subsequently released 15 students from the school, ITAR-Tass reported.

The attackers traded gunfire with police after the seizure of the school in Beslan in the North Ossetia. Three teachers and two police officers were wounded, a police spokesman said.

The hostage-takers, who drove up in a covered army transport truck, have apparently mined the school and threatened to blow it up if police storm in. They have demanded talks with regional officials but their demands are not known. It is also not known who the assailants are.

The attack came after a ceremony to mark the start of classes on the first day of the Russian school year.

There are 17 attackers, male and female, according to the Interfax news agency, citing a spokesman for the Federal Security Service.

Wednesday's hostage-taking follows Tuesday night's suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway that killed 10 people and injured more than 50. Officials said a female suicide bomber set off the homemade bomb.

Last week, two Russian passenger planes crashed nearly, killing 90 people.

A militant Islamist group claimed responsibility on a website for the subway bombing and the plane crashes. They claim it's revenge for the Russia's war with Chechnya.

The group's claims have not been verified.

[Castro]

PACE's Schieder urges Ossetia hostage-takers to free people

Interfax. Wednesday, Sep. 1, 2004, 4:41 PM Moscow Time

STRASBOURG. Sept 1 (Interfax-Europe) - Peter Schieder, president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, issued an urgent appeal on Wednesday in connection with the hostage drama in a North Ossetian school and a bombing near the Rizhskaya metro station in Moscow on Tuesday evening.
"We urge the perpetrators to free all of the hostages immediately," Schieder said in the appeal. He also said PACE "stands ready to assist the Russian authorities in any way possible to secure a peaceful outcome."
Schieder also condemned the bombing near the Rizhskaya station and extended his condolences on behalf of the PACE to the families of the victims and expressed Europe's full solidarity with the Russian people and authorities at this difficult time

[Castro]

30 Women and Children Freed in Beslan

cute pic
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/09/03/001.html

[jeddahteacher]

American "Neocons" support Chechen terrorists.
JT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1299318,00.html


[I]n the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

[waxwing]

People always used to laugh at me when I suggested CIA involvement in the Chechen separatist movement (=gang of vicious thugs, much like in Afghanistan, 'northern alliance' etc.).

I would tend to think if it happened it was *very* covert and basically just money. And after Sept. 11 I feel sure they quietened it right down, or just got out of it completely. Unless you want to go no-holds-barred conspiracy theorising, because the hypocrisy is so breathtaking as to be laughable otherwise.

Of course people say that most of the Chechen warlords money comes from mafia operations, drugs, kidnappings, protection rackets in Moscow etc. .. oh and Saudis perhaps .. and maybe that's true. But the pattern of American activity in the region suggests that they would consider it geopolitically highly important to destabilise and eventually eliminate any Russian control over the large fossil fuel deposits in the Caspian. They're already right at the Russian border in Georgia.