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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Hundreds still missing in Beslan |
| 2004-10-17 |
| Nearly 400 people who were held hostage in the Beslan school siege are still unaccounted for, according to a website run by teachers who were there. The list of killed, injured or missing on the www.beslan.ru website has 1,338 names - while the prosecutor-general's office gave a total of 1,156. Three local police officers have been charged with negligence over the siege, in which at least 338 people died. A Russian parliamentary commission has started investigating the tragedy. Russian Ekho Moskvy radio reports that more than 80 bodies remain unidentified. Nearly half of the people who died in Beslan in early September were children. The school in North Ossetia, in Russia's North Caucasus, was attacked by a group of heavily armed pro-Chechen militants, who fought a fierce gunbattle with Russian security forces as explosions wrecked the school. The radio said victims' representatives were not included on the commission - they would be confined to the role of eyewitnesses. Eleven senators from the Russian Federation Council - the upper house of parliament - are on the commission. Five of them previously worked for security bodies, such as the FSB or defence ministry, and the other six are civilians with civil service experience. Federation Council Chairman Sergei Mironov said he expected the commission's work to last no longer than six months. "Not one question will go unanswered," he pledged, vowing that the commission would get to the bottom of "the reasons and circumstances of the terrorist act in Beslan". Much controversy still surrounds the exact circumstances of the siege and of the violence in which it ended. President Vladimir Putin has vowed to take tough action, including pre-emptive strikes against Chechen separatists, who claimed responsibility for the school hostage-taking and other recent terror attacks. |
| Posted by:ed |