For the townspeople of Beslan, it was time to bury their children. Their grief and anger seemed unquenchable last week as each small casket was lowered into the earth, sometimes alongside a larger one holding a sibling or a parent who came along for what should have been a moment of promise, the first day of the school year. Now, this southern Russian community of 30,000 endures the heartbreaking aftermath of Russia's worst terrorist attack: the takeover of Beslan's Middle School No. 1, in which at least 368 people were killed and hundreds of others injured by explosions and gunfire.
The horrifying siege and its tragic outcome drew world attention, at least briefly, to the turmoil on Russia's southern periphery, a region of festering ethnic tensions and thwarted nationalist ambitions. And Russian authorities vowed to fight back. They put a $10 million bounty on the heads of two men they fingered as the attack's masterminds and threatened to track their followers worldwide. The outrage is understandable: The killings are but the latest of a dozen bloody attacks that have claimed nearly 1,000 lives in Russia over the past two years--half of them in the past month alone. Among the targets: airliners, commuter trains and subway stations, government buildings, a hospital, a rock concert, and a Moscow theater.
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