Beslan school siege
The Beslan school siege, also referred to as the Beslan school hostage crisis or the Beslan massacre, was a terrorist attack that occurred from 1 September 2004 to 3 September 2004. It lasted three days, and involved the imprisonment of more than 1,100 people as hostages, including 777 children, ending with the deaths of 334 people, 186 of them children, as well as 31 of the attackers. It is considered the deadliest school shooting in history.
The crisis began when a group of armed terrorists occupied School Number One in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, on 1 September 2004. The hostage-takers were members of the Riyad-us Saliheen, sent by the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who demanded Russia withdraw from and recognize the independence of Chechnya. On the third day of the standoff, Russian security forces stormed the building.
The event had security and political repercussions in Russia, leading to a series of federal government reforms consolidating power in the Kremlin and strengthening the powers of the President of Russia. Criticisms of the Russian government's management of the crisis have persisted, including allegations of disinformation and censorship in news media as well as questions about journalistic freedom, negotiations with the terrorists, allocation of responsibility for the eventual outcome and the use of excessive force.
Background
School No. 1 was one of seven schools in Beslan, a town of about 35,000 people in the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania in Russia's Caucasus. The school, located next to the district police station, housed approximately 60 teachers and more than 800 students. Its gymnasium, where most of the hostages were held for 52 hours, was a recent addition, measuring wide and long. There were reports that men disguised as repairmen had smuggled weapons and explosives into the school during July 2004, a fact that the authorities later denied; however, several witnesses have since testified they were forced to help their captors remove the weapons from caches hidden in the school. There were also claims that a "sniper's nest" on the sports-hall roof had been set up in advance.Course of the crisis
Day one
The attack on the school took place on 1 September, the traditional start of the Russian school year, referred to as "First Bell" or Knowledge Day. On this day, children, accompanied by their parents and other relatives, attend ceremonies hosted by their school. Because of the Knowledge Day festivities, the number of people in the schools was considerably higher than normal. Early in the morning, a group of several dozen heavily armed nationalist guerrillas left a forest encampment located in the vicinity of the village of Psedakh in the neighbouring Republic of Ingushetia, east of North Ossetia and west of war-torn Chechnya. The terrorists wore green military camouflage and black balaclava masks, and in some cases were also wearing explosive belts and explosive underwear. On the way to Beslan, on a country road near the North Ossetian village of Khurikau, they captured an Ingush police officer, Major Sultan Gurazhev. Gurazhev was left in a vehicle after the terrorists had reached Beslan and then ran toward the schoolyard and went to the district police department to inform them of the situation, adding that his duty handgun and badge had been taken.At 09:11 local time, the terrorists arrived at Beslan in a GAZelle police van and a GAZ-66 military truck. Many witnesses and independent experts claim that there were two groups of attackers, and that the first group was already at the school when the second group arrived by truck. At first, some at the school mistook the militants for Russian special forces practicing a security drill. However, the attackers soon began shooting in the air and forcing everyone from the school grounds into the building. During the initial chaos, up to 50 people managed to flee and alert authorities about the situation. A number of people also managed to hide in the boiler room. After an exchange of gunfire against the police and an armed local civilian, in which reportedly one attacker was killed and two were wounded, the militants seized the school building. Reports of the death toll from this shootout ranged from two to eight people, while more than a dozen people were injured.
The attackers took approximately 1,100 hostages. The number of hostages was initially downplayed by the government to the 200–400 range, and then for an unknown reason announced to be exactly 354. In 2005, the government's total was put at 1,128. The militants herded their captives into the school's gym and confiscated all of their mobile phones under threat of death. They ordered the hostages to speak in Russian and only when first spoken to. When a father named Ruslan Betrozov stood to calm people and repeated the rules in the local language of Ossetic, a gunman approached him, asked Betrozov if he was done, and then shot him in the head. Another father named Vadim Bolloyev, who refused to kneel, was also shot by a captor and then bled to death. Their bodies were dragged from the sports hall, leaving a trail of blood later visible in the video made by the terrorists.
After gathering the hostages in the gym, the attackers singled out 15–20 adults who they thought were the strongest among the male teachers, school employees and fathers, and took them into a corridor next to the cafeteria on the second floor, where an explosive belt on one of the female bombers detonated, killing another female bomber and several of the selected hostages, as well as mortally injuring one male terrorist. The surviving hostages from this group were then ordered to lie down and were shot with an automatic rifle by another gunman; all but one of them were killed. Karen Mdinaradze, the FC Alania team cameraman, survived the explosion as well as the shooting; when discovered to be still alive, he was allowed to return to the sports hall, where he lost consciousness. The militants then forced other hostages to throw the bodies out of the building and to wash the blood off the floor. One of these hostages, Aslan Kudzayev, escaped by jumping out of the window; the authorities briefly detained him as a suspected terrorist.
Beginning of the siege
A security cordon was soon established around the school, consisting of the Russian police, Internal Troops, Russian Army forces, Spetsnaz, and the OMON special units of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. A line of three apartment buildings facing the school gym was evacuated and taken over by the special forces. The perimeter that they made was within of the school, inside the range of the militants' grenade launchers. No firefighting equipment was in position and, despite the previous experiences of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, there were few ambulances ready. The chaos was worsened by the presence of Ossetian volunteer militiamen and armed civilians among the crowds who had gathered at the scene, altogether totaling perhaps as many as 5,000.The attackers mined the gym and the rest of the building with improvised explosive devices and surrounded it with tripwires. In a further bid to deter rescue attempts, they threatened to kill 50 hostages for every one of their own members killed by the police, and to kill 20 hostages for every gunman injured. They also threatened to blow up the school if government forces attacked. To avoid being overwhelmed by a gas attack as were their comrades in the 2002 Moscow hostage crisis, insurgents quickly smashed the school's windows. The captors prevented hostages from eating and drinking until North Ossetia's president Alexander Dzasokhov would arrive to negotiate with them. However, the FSB set up its own crisis headquarters from which Dzasokhov was excluded, and threatened to arrest him if he tried to go to the school.
The Russian government announced that it would not use force to rescue the hostages, and negotiations toward a peaceful resolution took place on the first and second days, at first led by Leonid Roshal, a pediatrician whom the hostage-takers had reportedly requested by name. Roshal had helped negotiate the release of children in the 2002 Moscow siege, but had also given advice to the Russian security services as they prepared to storm the theatre, for which he received the Hero of Russia award; however, a witness statement indicated that the Russian negotiators confused Roshal with Vladimir Rushailo, a Russian security official. According to State Duma member Yuri Savelyev's report, the official headquarters sought a peaceful resolution while the secret headquarters set up by the FSB was preparing the assault. Savelyev wrote that, in many ways, the "heavies" restricted the actions of the "civilians", in particular in their attempts to negotiate with the militants.
At Russia's request, a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council was convened on the evening of 1 September 2004, at which the council members demanded "the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages of the terrorist attack." U.S. president George W. Bush made a statement offering "support in any form" to Russia.
Day two
On 2 September 2004, negotiations between Roshal and the militants proved unsuccessful, and they refused to allow food, water or medicine to be taken in for the hostages or for the dead bodies to be removed from the front of the school. At noon, FSB First Deputy Director Colonel General Vladimir Pronichev showed Dzasokhov a decree signed by prime minister Mikhail Fradkov appointing the North Ossetian FSB chief, Major General Valery Andreyev, as head of the operational headquarters. However, in April 2005 a Moscow News journalist received photocopies of the interview protocols of Dzasokhov and Andreyev by investigators, revealing that two headquarters had been formed in Beslan: a formal one, upon which was laid all responsibility, and a secret one, which made the real decisions, and at which Andreyev had never been in charge.The Russian government downplayed the numbers, repeatedly stating there were only 354 hostages; this reportedly angered the hostage-takers, who further mistreated their captives. Several officials also said there appeared to be only 15 to 20 militants in the school. The crisis was met with a near-total silence from President of Russia Vladimir Putin and the rest of Russia's political leaders. Only on the second day did Putin make his first public comment on the siege during a meeting in Moscow with King Abdullah II of Jordan: "Our main task, of course, is to save the lives and health of those who became hostages. All actions by our forces involved in rescuing the hostages will be dedicated exclusively to this task." It was the only public statement by Putin about the crisis until the day after it ended. In protest, several people at the scene raised signs reading: "Putin! Release our children! Meet their demands!" and "Putin! There are at least 800 hostages!" The locals also said that they would not allow any storming or "poisoning of their children", an allusion to the Moscow hostage crisis chemical agent.
In the afternoon, the gunmen allowed former president of Ingushetia Ruslan Aushev to enter the school building and agreed to personally release to him 11 nursing women and all 15 babies. The women's older children were left behind and one mother refused to leave, so Aushev carried out her youngest child instead. The terrorists gave Aushev a videotape made in the school and a note with demands from their purported leader, Shamil Basayev, who was not present in Beslan. The existence of the note was kept secret by Russian authorities, while the tape was declared as being empty. It was falsely announced that the militants had made no demands. In the note, Basayev demanded recognition of a "formal independence for Chechnya" in the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States. He also said that although the Chechen separatists "had played no part" in the 1999 Russian apartment bombings, they would now publicly take responsibility for them if needed. Some Russian officials and state-controlled media later criticised Aushev for entering the school, accusing him of colluding with the terrorists.
The lack of food and water took a toll upon the young children, many of whom were forced to stand for long periods in the hot, tightly packed gym. Many children disrobed because of the sweltering heat in the gymnasium, which led to false rumors of sexual impropriety. Many children fainted, and parents feared that these children would die. Some hostages drank their own urine. Occasionally, the militants took out some of the unconscious children and poured water on their heads before returning them to the sports hall. Later in the day, some adults also started to faint from fatigue and thirst. Because of the conditions in the gym, when the explosions and gun battle began on the third day, many of the surviving children were so fatigued that they were barely able to flee.
Around 15:30, two grenades were detonated by the militants against security forces outside the school approximately ten minutes apart, setting a police car on fire and injuring one officer, but Russian forces did not return fire. As the day and night wore on, the combination of stress and sleep deprivation—and possibly drug withdrawal—made the hostage-takers increasingly hysterical and unpredictable. The crying of the children irritated them, and on several occasions crying children and their mothers were threatened that they would be shot if the crying did not cease. Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had listened to German heavy metal group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves "edgy and fired up".
Overnight, a police officer was injured by shots fired from the school. Talks were broken off, resuming the next day.