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Hostage-takers are Riyadus Salikhin
The exact number of hostages remained unclear — estimates ranged from 132 to nearly 400 — reflecting a scene of confusion and fear as parents gathered in anxious vigil, sometimes having to be restrained for trying to approach the school. A handful of other students earlier managed to escape, apparently after hiding in a boiler room, officials said. Earlier Rossiya, a state television network, showed a camouflaged soldier racing a young girl, dressed in a light lavender skirt, to safety, followed by an elderly woman.A man who answered the telephone at the school and identified himself as a spokesman for the fighters said they wanted talks with the leaders of North Ossetia and neighboring Ingushetia, as well as with a pediatrician who participated in negotiations with insurgents who seized a Moscow theater in October 2002. "Wipe your sniffles," the man said, speaking crudely in Russian with a Chechen accent, when asked what they hoped to discuss with the officials. He then hung up. Russia's defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, speaking in Moscow even as the hostage crisis unfolded in the south, said the attacks scourging the country amounted to a state of war. "War has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front," Mr. Ivanov said. "This is regrettably not the first and I fear not the last terrorist act." Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-09-01 |
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