Russia mourns after school hostage slaughter
Wails of mourning echoed through the streets of Beslan today, and the region’s top police officer reportedly resigned in the wake of the school hostage taking that left more than 350 people dead.
A shaken President Vladimir Putin went on national television yesterday to make a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness in the face of an “all-out war” by terrorists.
He told the Russian people that they must mobilise against terrorism and promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption.
“We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten,” he said in an address aimed at addressing the grief, shock and anger felt by many after a string of terrorist attacks that have killed some 450 people in the past two weeks, apparently in connection with the war in Chechnya.
Dozens of men dug graves in a football field-sized area of land next to the Beslan cemetery this morning, while surveyors across the road marked out new plots with wooden stakes and string.
Coffin lids stood outside the entrances to apartment buildings, along with wooden planks bearing the names of victims who were to be buried in funerals beginning later today.
Some 260 people are reported missing after the three-day hostage crisis, which ended in a bloody wave of explosions and gunfire on Friday when militants set off bombs rigged in the school gymnasium and commandos stormed the building.
Russian media speculated that some of the missing could be among the wounded who were brought to various hospitals in the southern Russian region, unconscious or in too deep a state of shock to be able to identify themselves.
Outside the shattered gymnasium today, Svetlana Debloyeva, 42, clutched a picture of her 11-year-old son Zaur, who is unaccounted for.
“I lost my boy,” she cried as she approached the building, where she had been squeezed in among the more than 1,100 hostages.
Regional emergency situations minister Boris Dzgoyev said 326 people, including 159 children, were killed and more than 540 people were wounded, mostly children.
Medical officials said 423 people remained in hospital, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
Dzgoyev also said 35 attackers – heavily-armed and explosive-laden men and women who were reportedly demanding independence for Chechnya – were also killed in 10 hours of battles that shook the area around the school with gunfire and explosions.
“What happened was a terrorist act that was inhuman and unprecedented in its cruelty,” Putin said in his televised speech. “It is a challenge not to the president, the parliament and the government but a challenge to all of Russia, to all of our people. It is an attack on our nation.”
Putin took a defiant tone, acknowledging Russia’s weaknesses, but blaming it on the fall of the Soviet Union, foreign foes seeking to tear apart Russia and on corrupt officials. He said Russians could no longer live ”carefree” and must all confront terrorism.
Measures would be taken to overhaul the law enforcement organs, which he acknowledged had been infected by corruption, and tighten borders.
“We are obliged to create a much more effective security system and to demand action from our law enforcement organs that would be adequate to the level and scale of the new threats,” he said.
North Ossetian interior minister Kazbek Dzantiyev tendered his resignation this morning, ITAR-Tass and the Interfax news agency reported.
“After what happened in Beslan, I don’t have the right to occupy this post as an officer and as a man,” ITAR-Tass quoted him as saying.
ITAR-Tass quoted an unidentified intelligence official as saying on Saturday that the school assault was financed by Abu Omar As-Seyf, an Arab who allegedly represents al Qaida in Chechnya, and masterminded by Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev.
The militants seized the school on the first day of classes on Wednesday, herding hundreds of children, parents who had been dropping their kids off, and other adults into the gymnasium, which the militants promptly wired with explosives – including bombs hanging from the basketball hoops.
The packed gym became sweltering, and the hostage-takers refused to allow in food or water.
One survivor, Sima Albegova, told the Kommersant newspaper she asked the militants why the captives were taken. ”Because you vote for your Putin,” one militant told her.
Another freed hostage said a militant told her, “If Putin doesn’t withdraw forces from Chechnya and doesn’t free our arrested brothers, we’ll blow everything up,” according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
Russian officials said the bloodshed began when explosions were apparently set off by the militants – possibly by accident – as emergency workers entered the school courtyard to collect the bodies of hostages killed in the initial raid Wednesday.
Hostages fled during the blasts, and the militants opened fire on them, prompting security forces to open fire and commandos to move in.
The explosions tore through the roof of the gymnasium, sending wreckage down on hostages, killing many. Many survivors emerged naked covered in ashes and soot, their feet bloody from jumping barefoot out of broken windows to escape.
