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ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia (AP) - Authorities killed five people and arrested four others suspected of helping stage the hostage-taking raid on a southern Russian school last September, prosecutors said Friday. Officials believe the arrested were involved in the Sept. 1-3 attack on School No. 1 in the North Ossetia region town of Beslan "at the stage of its preparation," Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel said. The siege ended in gunfire and explosions; about half of the more than 330 people killed were children. Five other suspects were killed while resisting arrest, Shepel said in a statement. It did not say when...

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia (AP) - Russian authorities have killed five people and arrested four others suspected of aiding the hostage-taking attack on a school in southern Russia last fall that killed 330 people, prosecutors said Friday. Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel said in a statement that the arrested men were suspected of helping stage the attack in Beslan, where assailants held more than 1,000 hostages for nearly three days before the siege ended Sept. 3 in gunfire and explosions. Shepel said that five other suspects were killed while resisting arrest. The statement did not say when or where the raid took...

BESLAN, RUSSIA – Among the wilted flowers brought to celebrate the first day of classes in the now blackened wreckage of Beslan's School No. 1 are the abundant signs of a sophisticated terror operation. That evidence is sparking a re-examination of the long-standing Chechen links to Al Qaeda. "They were so well trained - the highest level," says Oleg Tedeyev, deputy chief of a local police unit, who was involved in the battle Friday that freed more than 700 people, and officially left 338 dead, half of them children. In recent months, radical Islamist Chechen leaders such as Shamil Basayev,...

After lurking for years, my first post. I've been puzzled by the mainstream media's reticence to link Al Qaeda with the Chechen "separatists" who committed the bloody atrocity this week in the Russian school. Why? As I noted on my blog (Partisan NewsJunkie) today, both Richard Clarke's book "Against All Enemies" and the "9/11 Commission Report" make the link between Al Qeada and Chechnya. In fact, I read yesterday in the Commission report that Mohammed Atta, leader of the 9/11 attacks, and his friends tried to enlist to fight in Chechnya! "...they had formed a close-knit group as students in...

May 18 2003 'Al-Qaeda reorganising in Pakistan, Chechnya' NEW YORK: The al-Qaeda terror network is reorganising, training new members and planning new attacks, The New York Times reported on Saturday, citing counter-terrorism officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East. One senior official told the daily that al-Qaeda now had an estimated 3,000 members - far fewer than in the 1990s, when some 20,000 people were believed to have trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. But there has been a spike in recruitment since the US invaded Iraq in March, the report said. And the network is reorganising into "smaller,...

The Russian foreign ministry linked a series of suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia and Chechnya, as a top Russian official accused al-Qaeda of being behind the deadly blast in the breakaway republic. "The blasts in Saudi Arabia, in Chechnya and other places - these are links in the same chain," Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement. "This leaves no doubt that the problem of terrorism in all its forms has not only not disappeared, but that it calls for the further mobilisation and concentration of the powers of all countries to fight against this evil," he...