An armed gang that stormed a school in southern Russia may be holding as many as 1,500 hostages, far above the official figure of 350, newspapers quoted freed hostages on Friday as saying.
| The figure might be a little high, but they've freed more than 350 by now, and there are a lot of dead... |
The eyewitnesses, among 26 women and infants released on Thursday, also said the group of up to 40 captors was refusing to give hostages food and water.
| 20 Bad Guys reported dead, apparently after this article went up, and some escaped... |
"You know, there aren't 350 people in there, but 1,500 in all. People are lying one on top of another," Zalina Dzandarova, a 27-year-old woman, told the Kommersant daily. The hostages were seized on Wednesday morning -- the first day of the new school year in Russia -- by an armed gang in an raid that bore all the hallmarks of a Chechen rebel operation. "On the TV they are saying that there are 350 of us. It's not true. There are no fewer than 1,500 of us in the school," Izvestiya quoted an unnamed mother as saying. The Gazeta daily quoted a third woman saying there were 1,020 hostages. Izvestiya said 860 pupils attended School No.1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. But the number of people on the campus would have been swelled by parents and relatives attending the first day ceremony traditional in Russian schools.
Dzandarova said the masked gang struck at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. They began shooting into the air. "Everybody, parents and children, ran in panic into the school building," she said, adding that the attackers killed people left in the school yard and those who resisted. Two women assailants blew themselves up in a corridor, killing a number of male hostages. Hostages were later herded into the school gym, where the captors booby-trapped the basketball hoops, the woman told Izvestiya. Dzandarova said some injured hostages were taken out of the sports hall into a corridor and "finished off." Others feeling unwell were sent to the changing rooms.
The captors were well organized and resting in shifts. "None of the terrorists removed their masks. Nobody can see their faces. They aren't tired. They are resting in turns," she said. "They call themselves Chechens, and demand that Russia withdraws its forces from Chechnya." |