15 schoolchildren released from hostage school: Report

Fifteen children have been allowed to leave a school at the centre of a hostage crisis in Russia, according to media reports.

Armed men and women have occupied the school in the Russian region of North Ossetia.

At least two people were killed, including a father who had brought his child to the school and was shot when he tried to resist the raiders. A gunman was also killed and nine people were injured.

The attack was launched after a ceremony marking the first day of the Russian school year when many parents had accompanied their children to the school.

The attackers warned they would blow up the school if police tried to storm it and forced children to stand at the windows, said Alexei Polyansky, a police spokesman for southern Russia.

Suspicion in both the school attack and yesterday’s Moscow bombing in which 10 people were killed fell on Chechen rebels or their sympathisers, but there was no evidence of any direct link.

The two strikes came just a week after two Russian planes carrying 90 people crashed almost simultaneously in what officials also say were terrorist bombings.

“In essence, war has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front,” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said.

Gunfire broke out after the attack and at least three teachers and two police officers were wounded, Polyansky said. More gunfire and several explosions were heard about three hours later, the Interfax news agency reported.

Polyansky said most of the attackers were wearing suicide bomb belts.

The attackers demanded talks with regional officials and a well-known paediatrician, Leonid Roshal, who had aided hostages during the seizure of a Moscow theatre in 2002. At least 129 hostages died in that incident.

The hostage-takers at the school demanded the release of fighters detained over a series of attacks on police facilities in neighbouring Ingushetia in June, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, citing regional officials. Those raids killed more than 90 people.

ITAR-Tass, citing regional emergency officials, said about 400 people including some 200 children were being held captive. The hostages had been herded into the school gymnasium.

There were 17 attackers, both male and female, Interfax said, citing Ismel Shaov, a regional spokesman for the Federal Security Service.

In television footage from outside the school in Beslan, a town about 10 miles north of the regional capital of Vladikavkaz, men in camouflage with heavy-calibre machine guns took up positions on the perimeter and other men in civilian dress with light automatic rifles paced nervously.

At one point, a girl of about age seven in a floral print dress and a red bow in her hair streaked around a corner apparently after fleeing from the school, her hand held by a flak-jacketed soldier, followed by an older woman. Russian news reports said about 50 students managed to escape, some after hiding in the school’s boiler room during the raid.

“I was standing near the gates, music was playing when I saw three armed people running with guns, at first I though it was a joke, when they fired in the air and we fled,” a teenage witness, Zarubek Tsumartov, said on Russian television.

The attack was the latest in a string of violence that has tormented Russians and plagued the government of President Vladimir Putin, who came to power in 2000 vowing to crush the Chechen rebels but has been largely unable to do so.

Terrorism fears in Russia had risen markedly following the plane crashes and the suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station last night that killed 10 people and wounded more than 50.

A militant Muslim web site published a statement claiming responsibility for the bombing on behalf of the ”Islambouli Brigades,” a group that also claimed responsibility for the airliner crashes.

The statement said the bombing was a blow against Putin, “who slaughtered Muslims time and again.” Putin has refused to negotiate with rebels in predominantly Muslim Chechnya who have fought Russian forces for most of the past decade, saying they must be wiped out.

Putin interrupted his working holiday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi today and returned to Moscow, after doing the same last week because of the plane crashes. Upon arrival at the Moscow airport, Putin held an immediate meeting with the heads of Russia’s Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service, the Interfax news agency said.