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| Caucasus |
| Some hostage-takers may still be at large |
| 2004-09-05 |
| Two days after the bloody end of a hostage crisis that left more than 350 people dead, the identity of the attackers who seized a school in Russia's North Caucasus region remained uncertain. Shortly after the standoff reached its bloody finale on Friday, at least two Russian officials said that several of the hostage takers were Arabs - nine of them, according to an adviser to President Vladimir Putin, or 10, according to the head of the Federal Security Service in North Ossetia, the republic where the attack took place. The ITAR-Tass news agency on Saturday quoted an unnamed, high-ranking intelligence official in southern Russia as saying experts had surmised from facial structures, and other unspecified characteristics, that one attacker was black and nine were Arabs born in countries close to the "equatorial part of the Arabian peninsula," possibly including Sudan and South Yemen. In Beslan, the town where the school was seized, some residents were skeptical of the government's portrayal of the attack as an international operation. They tended to look to neighbouring republics in the North Caucasus - particularly war-torn Chechnya, whose rebels have carried out similar assaults in the past, and Ingushetia, whose Ingush ethnic group has tense relations with Ossetians. There was also uncertainty about the number of hostage-takers, and in some cases their fate. North Ossetia's Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said Saturday that 35 attackers were killed. Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said Sunday that according to the latest information, 32 terrorists had been involved and the bodies of 30 of them had been found, the Interfax news agency reported. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |