MOSCOW, 5 September 2004 — The death toll in the hostage crisis in the southern Russian town of Beslan rose to 358 yesterday as President Vladimir Putin called for a new approach to law enforcement in the country.
Regional Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said 323 victims, including 156 children, had been killed in the violence. Russian Deputy Prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky said that all 35 attackers had been eliminated.
Medical officials said 448 people, including 248 children had been hospitalized as a result of the crisis, which ended in a wave of violence Friday. Commandos stormed the school and battled militants as crying children, some naked and covered with blood, managed to flee through explosions and gunfire after 53 hours during which the hostage-takers herded them into the gym, denied them food and water and threatened to kill them by detonating explosives they had rigged up.
Most of the dead had been in the school’s gymnasium, officials said. They were killed either by explosions that brought down the roof or by the fire and the battles between soldiers and captors that followed.
Freed hostages described Friday’s mayhem. “Bombs were strung all over the gym,” one teenage girl told state television. “Tape came unstuck on one and it blew up.”
“There were two big explosions,” said a woman in her 40s. “We started pushing all the children out of the windows... Everyone who was there started pushing them out.”
Explosives and arms used by the gunmen had been smuggled into the school well in advance during summer building work, Interfax quoted an unnamed regional security source as saying.
One source was quoted as saying the militants first scouted out two other schools before settling on School Number One — the main one in Beslan — because it was undergoing major reconstruction work over the summer. “Some of the teachers taken hostage recognized a few of the rebels because they worked on the school construction project,” Ismel Shaov, spokesman for the North Ossetian Interior Ministry, said.
“They brought in a lot of explosives while they were doing their work.”
Putin said international terrorists had declared “a full-scale war” against Russia, and that due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nation was weakened and unable to respond as effectively as it must.
“In general, we need to admit that we did not show an understanding of the complexities and dangers of the processes occurring in our own country and in the world,” he said. “In any case, we couldn’t adequately react ... We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten.”
— Additional input from agencies
