MOSCOW, 4 September 2004 — Russia’s hostage crisis came to a bloody end yesterday with terrified children fleeing from their captors into the arms of commandos amid gunfire and explosions.

More than 200 of some 1,200 people held hostage in the school in Beslan in North Ossetia were dead, and officials said the toll could rise significantly.

After hours of fierce gunbattles, Russian forces last night killed three militants holed up with captives in the basement of the school building, said Valery Andreyev, the region’s Federal Security Service chief.

Shortly after 8 p.m., a powerful blast rang out on school grounds, and an official said a member of an elite security unit died saving two young girls.

Twenty militants were killed in gunfights with security forces. Ten of them were Arabs, Andreyev said in televised comments. President Vladimir Putin’s adviser on Chechnya, Aslanbek Aslakhanov, also said a number of the dead militants were Arab mercenaries. Channel One TV said three of the hostage-takers were arrested after trying to escape in civilian dress.

At least 646 people were hospitalized, including 332 children.

Inside the school, the bodies of some 100 dead hostages lay in the gymnasium where they had been held since Wednesday, some apparently killed when a wall collapsed after unexplained explosions. Those explosions apparently triggered a dash for freedom by some teenage hostages and led to commandos storming the school.

Half-naked and bloodied children ran terrified through the street, grabbing water bottles from medics as gunfire cracked, ambulance sirens sounded, and mothers and children wailed. A stream of ambulances left the school carrying bodies, many of which looked lifeless.

“I smashed the window to get out,” one young boy with a bandaged hand told Russian television. “People were running in all directions... They (the rebels) shot from the roof.”

Six bodies lay covered with white sheets near the school gates.

Men and women filed past, hands covering their mouths, tentatively lifting the sheets to see if they recognized the bodies. A 40-year-old man wearing a light brown shirt kneeled by a body, crying into his hands.

Seventy-nine of the bodies had been identified by the evening.

Andreyev said militants fired at fleeing children, and security forces opened return fire — along with civilian residents of the town who had armed themselves. Two emergency services workers were killed and three wounded during the chaos, Interfax reported.

Women escaping the building were seen fainting and others, some covered in blood, were carried away on stretchers. Most children were only partly clothed because of the stifling heat in the gym and had no food or water for the 52 hours they were held captive.

At a hospital about a mile from the school, anguished crowds mobbed arriving ambulances in a desperate bid to see who was inside. Some two dozen children lay on bloodied stretchers under an adjacent grove of pine and spruce trees. Parents and relatives hugged and kissed them, giving them water.

The White House condemned the “barbaric” hostage-taking and blamed “the terrorists” for the loss of life. “There is no justification for the taking of innocent life, and the barbaric nature of this terrorist act is despicable,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in a statement. “The United States stands side by side with Russia in our global fight against terrorism.”

— Additional input from agencies