School gunmen free 26 hostages

Children and female hostages were released from the southern Russian siege school this afternoon, not long after suicide assailants had fired rocket-propelled grenades at cars.

The ITAR-Tass news agency reported that 26 women and children were released by militants holding the school in southern Russia.

An Associated Press Television News reporter saw soldiers escorting two women and at least two children away from the school. The children were in the soldiers’ arms.

A crowd of waiting relatives and friends immediately swarmed around him in an attempt to find out information about who was freed.

Before the surprise release, two large explosions roared out and cloud of black smoke rose from the vicinity of the school after the blasts.

The rescue operation’s headquarters said male and female attackers in the school fired grenade launchers at two cars that had apparently driven too close to the building. Neither car was hit, the headquarters said.

After the first blast, many of the anxious relatives and neighbours of the hostages who were milling in the area hurried toward the cordons, the ones in front craning their necks across the police lines to try to discern what had happened.

The black smoke soon dissipated.

The suicide gunmen and women who seized the school yesterday morning had threatened to blow it up if any rescue attempt was made.

In his first public remarks since the siege in Caucuses began, Russian President Vladimir Putin said: “Our main task is, of course, to save the life and health of those who became hostages.”

US President George Bush offered help to end the crisis but no request was made by the Russians.

As negotiators scrambled to find a way out of the tense stand-off, crowds of distraught relatives and townspeople waited helplessly for news of their neighbours and loved ones, their distress sharpened by the sporadic rattle of gunfire from the cordoned-off crisis site in Beslan, North Ossetia.

But as talks via phone continued on and off throughout the night and morning, details about who the militants are and what they want remained unclear.

Well-known paediatrician Leonid Roshal, who aided hostages during the deadly seizure of a Moscow theatre by Chechens in 2002, was leading the talks.

Russian TV reported that Roshal, whose participation the militants had demanded, offered the gunmen and women a safe corridor out of the school, but the offer was declined.

Lev Dzugayev, an aide to the North Ossetian president, said that so far the talks have not achieved anything.

How the police could end the stand-off without a storming was unclear, but Valery Andreyev, the Federal Security Service (FSB) regional chief said “there is no alternative to dialogue”.

“One should expect long and tense negotiations,” he added.

The school in Beslan, a town of about 30,000, is near the republic of Chechnya, where separatist rebels have been fighting Russian forces since 1999 and suspicion in the raid fell on Chechen militants although no claim of responsibility has been made.

An official in the joint-command operation for the crisis said on that 16 people were killed – 12 inside the school, two who died in hospital and two others whose bodies still lay outside the school and could not be removed because of gunfire – and 13 others wounded.

One of the dead was a pupil’s parent who tried to resist the attackers.

The raid came a day after a suspected Chechen suicide bomber blew herself up outside a Moscow underground station, killing nine people, and just over a week after 90 people died in two plane crashes that are suspected to have been blown up by Chechen women suicide bombers.

The series of attacks were seen as a blow to Putin, who cut short his Black Sea holiday to return to Moscow and postponed a planned two-day visit to Turkey.

His delay in making a public statement was characteristic, as was his decision to comment on the seizure during a Kremlin meeting with Jordanian King Abdullah rather than in a direct address to the nation.

Putin said: ”We understand these acts are not only against private citizens of Russia but against Russia as a whole.”

“What is happening in North Ossetia is horrible,” he said. “It’s horrible not only because some of the hostages are children but because this action can explode even a fragile balance of interconfessional and international relations in the region.”

Heavily-armed militants wearing masks descended on Middle School Number One on the opening day of the new school year. Dzugayev said 354 people were seized. Most of the captive children are aged under 14.

Little was known about food and sanitary condition inside the school. Offers to deliver food and water to the hostages were turned down, adding to the distress of the more than 2,000 waiting relatives and friends outside.

Many of the parents spent the night at the town’s cultural centre a few hundred metres from the school, weeping, pacing and trying to sleep, while the camouflage-clad special forces maintained their positions encircling the school.

“Just look in the eyes of any person here and you’ll understand immediately what people are feeling,” said Zelim Dzheriyev, 35, as he wiped tears from his eyes.

FSB chief Andreyev said elders from Chechnya and Ingushetia had offered to come to the school and act as stand-in hostages for the women and children inside.

He also said that some of the militants had been identified, and investigators were attempting to find their relatives and bring them to the school to help in negotiations.

From inside the school, the militants sent out a list of demands and threatened that if police intervened, they would kill 50 children for every hostage-taker killed and 20 children for every hostage-taker injured, .

Putin pledged five years ago to crush Chechnya’s rebels but instead has seen the insurgents increasingly strike civilian targets beyond the republic’s borders.

President Bush called Putin and “condemned the taking of hostages and the other terrorists attacks in Russia”.

He offered ”assistance” to Russia in dealing with the crisis if requested, but no request had been made so far, the White House said.

After an emergency session called for by Russia, the United Nations Security Council condemned “the heinous terrorist act” and demanded the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.