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| Fri, 09-03-2004 - 10:09pm |
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Saturday, September 04, 2004
10 Arabs among 20 militants killed in southern Russia
Compiled by Daily Star staff
BESLAN, Russia: Ten Arabs are among 20 militants killed following the hostage siege in southern Russia, an FSB security service official said on Friday.
"Among the 20 terrorists killed, there are 10 citizens of the Arab world," Valery Andreyev, the top regional security official, said on national television.
More than 100 people were reportedly killed and hundreds wounded Friday as Russian special forces stormed a school to free scores of children and adults held hostage for almost three days by militants demanding independence for Chechnya.
Tass quoted a source in the regional Interior Ministry as saying the school seizure had been planned by Shamil Basayev, Russia's most wanted Chechen rebel, and was led by field commander Magomet Yevloyev. The source said there was information it was financed by Abu Omar As-Seyf, who was believed to be Al-Qaeda's representative in Chechnya.
By early evening Friday, Russian troops were still fighting to free hostages from the school in North Ossetia, said the top local security official for the southern Russian region, Valery Andreyev.
Andreyev said authorities had identified the bodies of 60 victims in the first official toll of the day's bloody events.
But the Interfax news agency said over 100 corpses of hostages - some 1,000 were reported taken - were found in the school gymnasium. - Agencies
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=8048#

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Report: More than 200 dead after troops storm school
Three hostage-takers reportedly being interrogated; 27 killed
Friday, September 3, 2004 Posted: 10:00 PM EDT (0200 GMT)
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Gunfire, chaos as hostages run for safety.
BESLAN, Russia (CNN) -- The operation to end the school hostage crisis in Russia is over, an emergency official said late Friday, but more than 200 people have died.
The Interfax news agency, quoting Russian health officials, reported the death toll.
As rain fell in Beslan, soldiers began deactivating explosives that had been placed in the school. No gunfire was heard, but there were large explosions in the evening that appeared to be part of the de-mining operation.
Reports said as many as 1,200 hostages might have been inside the school and that 70 percent of them were children. Earlier reports had placed the number of hostages at a few hundred. (Map of school)
Valery Andreyev, head of the local branch of the FSB intelligence service, said 400 people had been freed as commandos stormed the school in an unplanned attack.
A news report said three hostage-takers have been arrested and are being interrogated. Russian forces killed 27 hostage takers, Interfax quoted officials as saying.
Andreyev said 10 of the dead hostage-takers were from Arab countries. It was thought that the rebels were all residents of the restive Republic of Chechnya or other parts of the Russian Caucasus.
Chechens in the past have been affiliated with the al Qaeda terror network, and an Arab connection in this incident further suggests a link between the Chechen rebel movement and international terrorists.
The standoff began Wednesday morning when armed militants took children, parents and teachers hostage on the first day of school in Beslan, located in North Ossetia, near Chechnya, where rebels have been fighting Russia and demanding independence for the Muslim-majority republic.
Raid wasn't planned
An FSB official told Russian media that troops had been ready for a long siege.
However, the forces stormed the building around midday after Russian officials, under a cease-fire agreement with militants, tried to collect bodies lying outside the building.
There was an explosion, scores of hostages fled, and hostage-takers opened fire on the children and rescue workers. One of the workers was killed and another was wounded.
One witness told a reporter that a hostage-taker had set off a suicide bomb in a gymnasium full of children.
Russian troops then opened fire at the rebels, and the battle began.
Russian forces blasted holes in a building of the school to create passages through which hostages could escape and soldiers could enter. The roof of the building collapsed onto the crowd below.
During the assault, a Russian soldier and a news cameraman were wounded by gunfire.
Interfax quoted a Defense official as saying that "the terrorists planted a lot of mines and booby-traps filled with metal bolts in the gym" where hostages were held.
Near the scene, news footage showed bodies of children on stretchers.
One woman leaned down to a young boy, hugging and caressing the youth, who shared a stretcher with a body. Other women stood, holding their hands to their mouths and weeping.
Children who survived said they were denied food and water and had to take off their clothes because of the heat. Some boys said that because they had no water, they had to drink their own urine.
The standoff followed a bloody week in Russia, in which a female suicide bomber killed nine people outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday and two airliners were downed by two suspected Chechen female suicide bombers on August 24, killing all 89 on board.
Russian officials have suggested the new wave of attacks is an attempt at revenge for last weekend's elections in Chechnya, in which a Kremlin-backed candidate won the presidency.
On Friday, the State Department issued an alert to Americans in Russia or traveling to Russia that "the potential for terrorist actions, including actions against civilians, is high and likely will remain so for some time."
Citing the plane crashes, hostage standoff and other violence in recent years, the State Department warned Americans against travel to Chechnya and nearby areas.
"United States government personnel are prohibited from traveling to these areas, and American citizens residing in these areas should depart immediately as the safety of Americans and other foreigners cannot be effectively guaranteed," the alert said.
The alert said there is no indication that Americans or American installations are being targeted but "the possibility of an American citizen being a random victim of these attacks exists."
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/09/03/russia.school/index.html
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Carnage As Troops Storm School
BESLAN, Russia, Sept. 3, 2004
(CBS/AP) Commandos stormed a school Friday 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. The Interfax news agency reported that more than 200 people died.
Officials said 95 victims were identified — some of them children whose shattered, bloodied bodies were placed on lines of stretchers — and Interfax quoted unnamed sources in the regional Health Ministry as saying more than 200 people were killed by fire from the militants or died from their wounds. The figure could not be confirmed.
Hundreds of hostages survived the more than two-day ordeal, in which militants which capped a series of terrorist attacks in Russia and by targeting children on the first day of school. More than 700 people were injured, officials said.
World governments angrily condemned the seizure of hostages at School No. 1 in Beslan, a town in the North Ossetia region, adjacent to warring Chechnya. U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday called it "another grim reminder of the length to which terrorists will go to threaten this civilized world."
CBS News Correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports the Russians insist they'd never planned to storm the building, claiming they were still negotiating when one of the hostage-taker's bombs suddenly went off.
An explosives expert told NTV television that the commandos charged into the building after bombs hung in school gym basketball hoops by the hostage-takers exploded. A sobbing young girl who escaped told NTV that a suicide bomber blew herself up in the gym where hostages had been held since the seizure Wednesday morning.
Twenty militants were killed in gunfights with security forces Friday, 10 of them from Arab countries, Valery Andreyev, the region's Federal Security Service chief, said in televised comments. Putin's adviser on Chechnya, Aslanbek Aslakhanov, said nine of them were Arab mercenaries. News agencies later quoted officials as saying eight bodies had been found, but it was unclear whether those were in addition to the 20.
After trading fire with militants holed up in the basement of a school annex, officials said that resistance from the militants was over but that three or four remained at large, Russian news agencies reported.
But sporadic explosions and gunfire persisted after the reports, and an official at the crisis headquarters said two militants had been killed at or near the school, which was in fire, around midnight Friday (2000GMT).
Officials said three suspected hostage-takers were arrested trying to escape — wearing civilian dress, according to some reports — 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 neighboring 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.
The ITAR-Tass news agency cited unspecified Russian security sources as saying that the school raid was financed by al Qaeda and masterminded by Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev. The report also said an alleged al Qaeda operative, Abu Omar as-Saif, coordinated the financing of the attack.
Regional President Alexander Dzasokhov said Friday that 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 neighboring region.
Officials at the crisis headquarters said 95 victims had been identified. Emergency Situations Ministry officials said 704 people were hospitalized, including 259 children. Many were badly burned.
Aslakhanov said the death toll could be "much more" than 150, Interfax reported, 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.
The militants raided the school a day after a female suicide bomber killed eight bystanders outside a Moscow subway station, 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 the school told Associated Press Television News that 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 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, following the explosions.
Russian officials said the violence came when — under an agreement reached in the 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 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. A 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, told APTN.
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 Thursday 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. He made no public comment Friday.
The militants had freed about 26 women and children on Thursday, 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, and windows were shattered.
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 in preparation for an assault.
Two major hostage-taking raids by Chechen rebels outside the war-torn region in the past decade prompted forceful Russian rescue operations that led to many deaths. The seizure of a Moscow theater in 2002 ended after a knockout gas was pumped into the building, debilitating the captors but causing almost all of the 129 hostage deaths.
In 1995 — during the first of two wars in Chechnya in the past decade — rebels led by Basayev seized a hospital in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk, taking some 2,000 people hostage. The six-day standoff ended with a fierce Russian assault, and some 100 people died.
In Beslan on Friday, anguished relatives mobbed arriving ambulances to see who was inside and checked lists of the wounded posted on hospital walls. 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 denied then during the ordeal.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/01/world/main639914.shtml
I'll tell you what I believe. GWB takes the war on terror seriously. Kerry has been minimizing its importance every chance he gets. I don't know how GWB would stop something like this but for the moment, such an atrocity is not happening here. So whatever he's doing is working so far. Kerry, OTOH, will fight the war on terror on a much more SENSITIVE level (whatever THAT means). Unfortunately, or rather, true to form, Kerry avoids elucidating such a strategy. We are to blindly trust him. We are not to question him.
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Yet when such alerts are issued, liberals mock the severity and seriousness of such alerts accusing the administration of using them for political gain. Liberals decry the use of alerts as having political motives yet they pull their hair and gnash their teeth as they declare the citizens' need to be vigilant. So just what exactly are liberals complaining about?
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I would like for them to be called what they are without mincing words: RUSSIAN SOLDIERS. The word commandos is deliberately used to rile up emotions AGAINST the RUSSIAN SOLDIERS who had to deal with MUSLIM TERRORISTS TERRORIZING INNOCENT LITTLE CHILDREN. Is that clear enough for you liberals out there?
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In my opinion, anyone who tries to soften this tragedy by minimizing or deliberately keeping the identities of the terrorists buried or tries to garner sympathy for the terrorists through the clever use of words and sanitizing phrases is, to me, giving aid and comfort and legitimacy to these terrorist groups. And yes, they are PRO-TERRORISTS.
http://messageboards.ivillage.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=iv-elinthenews&msg=7102.33&ctx=0
You fight this by enlisting the support of the rest of the Muslim world (see their reaction in article in above link)...not by alienating it by rash moves.
Thank God that is just one of many opinions out there. :D
Have you read the article?
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