Posted on 09/03/2004 11:15:02 PM PDT by Destro
Putin sees Russian tragedy
September 4, 2004 - 2:19PM
Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited the town where commandos stormed a school in which militants were holding hundreds hostage in a chaotic battle that left at least 95 people dead.
"All Russia grieves with you," Putin said during a meeting with local officials in Beslan in the North Ossetia region, broadcast on government television.
He said targeting children made the hostage crisis worse than other acts of terrorism: "Even alongside the most cruel attacks of the past this terrorist act occupies a special place because it was aimed at children."
He said he had ordered the region's borders closed while officials search for everyone connected with the attack.
Putin arrived with smoke still rising from the shattered school, only hours after the last scattered shooting died away.
On Friday, commandos stormed the building and battled militants as crying children, some naked and covered with blood, managed to flee through explosions and gunfire.
They had endured more than two days during which the hostage takers herded them into the school gym, denied them food and water and threatened to kill them.
Other children lay dead on stretchers lined up outside.
Officials said they had identified 95 of the dead. The Interfax news agency, citing unidentified officials, said the toll was over 200.
The attack follows a suicide bomb attack outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday that killed eight people, and last week's near-simultaneous crash of two Russian jetliners last week after what officials believe were explosions on board.
Putin warned against letting the latest attack in North Ossetia stir up tensions in the multi-ethnic North Caucasus region.
"One of the goals of the terrorist was to sow ethnic enmity and blow up the North Caucasus," Putin said.
"Anyone who gives in to such a provocation will be viewed by us as abetting terrorism," he said.
During a hospital visit, a sombre Putin saw several of the victims, stopping to stroke the head of one injured child.
Russian authorities said the bloody end to the standoff came after explosions apparently set off by the militants - possibly by accident - as emergency workers were entering the school to collect the bodies of slain hostages.
As hostages took their chance to flee, the militants opened fire on them, and security forces - along with town residents who had brought their own weapons - opened covering fire to help the hostages escape.
Commandos stormed into the building and secured it, then chased fleeing militants in the town, with shooting lasting for 10 hours.
An explosives expert told NTV television that the hostage takers, themselves strapped with explosives, hung bombs from basketball hoops in the gym and set other explosive devices in the building. Bomb experts are examining the building.
The Federal Security Service chief in North Ossetia, Valery Andreyev, said that 10 militants killed in gunfights with security forces were from Arab countries, and Putin's adviser on Chechnya, Aslanbek Aslakhanov, said nine were "Arab mercenaries."
An Arab presence among the attackers would help Putin argue 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 - seen by Putin's critics as an attempt to deflect human rights criticism.
The region's governor, Alexander Dzasokhov, said that the militants had demanded that Russian troops leave Chechnya - the first solid indication that the attack was connected to the rebellion.
The hostage crisis ended in chaos as fleeing hostages, many of them injured, streamed from the building into the surrounding area and parents searched frantically for their children. Ambulances couldn't carry all the injured and private cars were pressed into service.
Alla Gadieyeva, a 24-year-old hostage who was seized with her son and mother - all three were among the survivors - said the captors laughed when she asked them for water for her mother.
"When children began to faint, they laughed," Gadieyeva said. "They were totally indifferent."
Two emergency services workers were killed and three wounded during the chaos, Interfax reported. Eighteen wounded commandos were being treated in a Defence Ministry hospital in the town of Vladikavkaz, the news agency reported, most of them with bullet wounds.
The militants had reportedly threatened to blow up the building if authorities used force. Russian officials stressed that they had not planned to storm the school.
Intermittent negotiations led to the freeing of 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.
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.
The gymnasium's roof collapsed during the assault, possibly because of the explosions, and the sprawling red-brick school was left a smoking ruin.
The militants had broken most of the windows early in the standoff in what may have been an effort to keep authorities from using knockout gas against them.
Two major hostage-taking raids by Chechen rebels outside the war-torn region in the past decade provoked Russian rescue operations that led to many deaths.
The seizure of a Moscow theatre 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 guerrilla commander Shamil 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.
© 2004 AP
Why would Shia Iran supply a nuke to the Chechens wahabists? The Pakistanis already have a bomb and they are allied to the Chechens - Afghanistan - Pakistan's ally was the only nation that recognized Chechnya as an independent country. It would be easier to get the bomb from Pakistan or to hire the Pakis to make one for them.
That's the stomach-churning issue that keeps many people in government up at night. Not a lot of good options if that happens.
The delusional liberals in the schools (and everywhere) need to be informed that this could happen here. They should work out a plan to defend the children from attack. This needs to be done NOW.
(Personally, I am outraged. Every teacher should have a gun hidden somewhere in case the Islamofacists make a move. But sadly I know this is way too much to ask of liberal teachers.)
I continue to pray that the blinders of PC will be removed from the eyes of our nation, so we can defend ourselves.
Home School, and if that's not an option, then find a competent private group that DOES utilize self-defense of your youngins...
I believe this is imperative in America if we really don't want to have to go down to the godless government school and see our children coming out bleeding, decimated, mangled and dead, even shot in the back before your eyes.
It should be an A-1 priority...
"Looking at the world through geopolitical eyes Iran is not a danger to Russia."
Wrong. Iranian nuclear tipped missiles will be able to reach Moscow, and the Iranians will use them.
No bag limit.
No bag limit.
No bag limit.
And no posting limits either. ;)
A district in California has a mandatory social studies curriculum that deals with Islam. Children are encouraged to dress as Muslims, learn Muslim prayers and memorize certain tenets of the Islamofascist religion. A parent who became upset over this sued the school district and LOST.
I would be interested to know if this course is going to be given this year. If it is, perhaps a student could offer to do a project, using some of the pictures that have appeared over the past few days.
If I could only remember the name of the district, I would e-mail them some of these pictures for use in their curriculum.
Gotta love those government schools...
Why? No Shia in Iran. They may target Israel and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Pakistan but not Russia. Iran is joining up with India and Russia to create a military bloc.
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