95 bodies identified after Russian school siege

Commandos stormed a school today in southern Russia and battled separatist rebels holding hundreds of hostages as crying children, some naked and covered in blood, fled the building through explosions and gunfire.

Ninety-five bodies have been identified, but one official said the death toll could far exceed 150.

Hundreds escaped the school, but the bodies of some 100 dead hostages lay on the gymnasium floor where the captives had been held since Wednesday, reports said.

A police sapper told NTV television that the commandos stormed the building after bombs – hung in basketball hoops by the hostage-takers – exploded.

A hostage who escaped the school told NTV that a suicide bomber blew herself up in the gym where children were kept captive.

Twenty militants were killed in gunfights with security forces, 10 of them Arabs, Valery Andreyev, the region’s Federal Security Service chief, said in televised comments.

President Vladmir Putin’s adviser on Chechnya, Aslanbek Aslakhanov, also said a number of the dead militants were Arab mercenaries.

The bloody outcome reflected badly on the President, who had pledged to do everything possible to save the lives of the 1,200 hostages – almost 850 of them children.

And military chiefs face the axe for allowing their troops – including crack special forces – to launch the raid.

After trading fire with militants holed up in the basement of a school annex, officials said the fighting was over, but that two militants remained at large.

Three suspected hostage-takers were arrested trying to escape wearing civilian dress, Channel One TV reported, and Ekho Moskvy radio said a suspected female hostage-taker was detained when she approached an area hospital wearing a white robe.

The Arab presence among the attackers would bolster Putin’s case that the Russian campaign in neighbouring Chechnya, where mostly Muslim separatists have been fighting Russian forces in a brutal war for most of the past decade, is part of the war on international terrorism.

Regional President Alexander Dzasokhov said the hostage-takers had demanded that Russian troops leave Chechnya – the first clear indication of their demands and of a direct link between the attack on the school and the ongoing war in the neighbouring region.

Officials at the crisis headquarters said 95 victims had been identified, and Andreyev said 556 people were hospitalised, including 332 children, while Emergency Situations Ministry officials put the number of hospitalised at 646, 227 of them children.

Aslakhanov also told Interfax the death toll might be ”much more” than 150, and said in televised comments that the militants claimed they initially seized some 1,200 hostages, most of them children – far more than earlier estimates of 350.

A member of an elite security unit died saving two young girls, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

The militants seized the school in North Ossetia on Wednesday, a day after a suicide bomb blast outside a Moscow subway station killed at least nine people, and just over a week after two Russian passenger jets crashed nearly simultaneously after what authorities believed were explosions on board triggered by suicide bombers, possibly Chechen women.

A hostage who escaped said the militants numbered 28, including women in camouflage. The hostage, who identified himself only as Teimuraz, said the militants began wiring the school with explosives as soon as they took control on Wednesday.

The commandos stormed the school on the third day of the crisis, moving in after about 30 women and children broke out of the building, some bloodied and screaming, after the explosions.

Russian officials said the violence came when – under an agreement reached this morning – emergency workers entered the school to retrieve the bodies of hostages who had been killed.

A local legislator, Azamat Kadykov, had told the hostages’ relatives that 20 adult men had been executed.

Andreyev said that there were two large explosions, and people started running. He said militants fired at fleeing hostages, and security forces opened return fire, along with civilian residents of the town who had armed themselves.

The police sapper, speaking on NTV television, said bombs hanging from basketball hoops exploded.

The bomb expert said the gym had also been rigged with explosives packed in plastic bottles strung up around the room on a cord and stuffed with metal objects.

Women escaping the building were seen fainting and others, some covered in blood, were carried away on stretchers. Many children – parched, hungry and only partly clothed because of the stifling heat in the gym – ran out screaming and begging for water.

“They didn’t let me go to the toilet for three days, not once. They never let me drink or go to the toilet,” Teimuraz, the escaped hostage said.

Two emergency services workers were killed and three wounded during the chaos, Interfax reported.

Interfax said the school’s roof collapsed, possibly from the explosives. The militants had reportedly threatened to blow up the building if authorities used force. Andreyev and Aslakhanov said there had been no plans to storm the school and that authorities had pinned hopes on negotiations.

Putin had said yesterday that everything possible would be done to end the “horrible” crisis and save the lives of the children and other hostages in this town of 35,000 people.

The militants had freed about 26 women and children yesterday, and Russian officials and others had been in on-and-off contacts with the hostage-takers, but with few signs of progress toward a resolution.

The roof collapse left a jagged opening to the sky, and one section of the sprawling school red-brick looked like the wall had been punched in. Huge columns of smoke rose from the school.

Windows were shattered, part of roof was gone and another part was charred.

The militants had broken most of the windows early in the crisis in what might have been an effort to prevent authorities from using gas to knock them out against them.

Less than a mile from the school, anguished relatives mobbed arriving ambulances to see who was inside. Some two dozen children lay on bloodied stretchers under a grove of pine and spruce trees.

Parents and relatives hugged and kissed them, feeding them water.

One weeping man led away a young boy muddied and bleeding. The smell of gunpowder lingered in the air around the school.