200 children held hostage in school terror attack

Armed men wrapped in suicide-bomb belts seized a school in the Russian region of North Ossetia today and were holding hundreds of hostages, including some 200 children.

Around 20 men seized the school on the first day of the Russian school year when a large number of parents had accompanied their children to class.

Reports said the raid took place in the city of Beslan just after a ceremony marking the school year’s start.

The ITAR-Tass news agency said about 400 people including some 200 children were being held captive.

The Interfax news agency said there were 17 attackers, both male and female, and the gang included some who were wearing suicide-bomb belts.

Beslan is about 10 miles north of Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, a republic that borders warring Chechnya.

There were no immediate reports of whether the assailants were making demands or indications of who they were.

However, Chechen rebels who raided a Moscow theatre in 2002, seizing hundreds of hostages, included women who were heavily wrapped with explosives.

In 1995, Chechen rebels led by warlord Shamil Basayev seized a hospital in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk, taking some 2,000 people hostage. The six-day standoff ended with a fierce Russian police assault. Some 100 people died in the incident.

Today’s seizure came as terrorism fears in Russia rose markedly following a suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station last night that killed 10 people and injured more than 50 and last week’s near-simultaneous crashes of two Russian airliners, killing a total of 90 people.