School Siege Drags Into 2nd Day

A respected pediatrician negotiated through the night to end a standoff with militants who threatened to blow up a school they seized 24 hours before with about 350 hostages, including children, trapped inside.

Family members kept vigil near the school and as the morning dawned, they were back on the streets hoping for the best, but fearing the worst, reports CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer. Occasional explosions and sporadic bursts of gunfire were heard from the school.

At least some of the hostage takers are believed to be Chechen rebels like the ones who took Moscow theatergoers hostage in 2002. They asked for the same negotiator who managed to get the children in the audience two years ago released. Local officials say the hostage takers have turned down delivery of food and water and they also refused the suggestion to allow volunteer adults to replace the child hostages. As for their demands, which aren't yet clear, stricken parents are unanimous, they say, "give them whatever they want."

Negotiations via phone continued on-and-off throughout the night and early morning, involving well-known pediatrician Leonid Roshal. Russia's NTV television reported that Roshal had told the militants they would be promised a safe corridor out, but the request was refused.

Lev Dzugayev, an aide to the North Ossetian president, said Thursday morning that so far the talks have not achieved anything.

Two large explosions could be heard Thursday afternoon near the school. Large plumes of black smoke rose over the school area after the blasts.
The immediate area around the school had been cordoned off and details of the blasts were not immediately available.

The raiders reportedly have threatened to blow up the school if police storm it, but what they wanted and who they were remained unclear.

The school in Beslan, a town of about 30,000, is in North Ossetia, near the republic of Chechnya where separatist rebels have been fighting Russian forces since 1999. Suspicion in the raid fell on Chechen militants although no claim of responsibility has been made.

Casualty reports in the raid varied widely, but an official in the joint-command operation for the crisis said on condition of anonymity early Thursday that 16 people were killed — 12 inside the school, two who died in hospital and two others whose bodies still lay outside the school and could not be removed because of gunfire. Thirteen others were wounded.

However, an aide to North Ossetian President Lev Dzugayev said that seven were killed. He also gave the number of hostages at 354. The children were mostly under 14.

The raid came a day after a suspected Chechen suicide bomber blew herself up outside a Moscow subway station, killing nine people, and just over a week after 90 people died in two plane crashes that are suspected to have been blown up by suicide bombers.

President Vladimir Putin, who interrupted his working holiday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to return to Moscow for the second time in a week, also postponed a planned two-day visit to Turkey, due to start Thursday, the Kremlin said.

In his first public comment on the raid, Putin on Thursday described the seizure as "horrible" and pledged to do everything possible to save the lives of the hundreds of hostages.

"We understand these acts are not only against private citizens of Russia but against Russia as a whole," Putin said in comments broadcast on Russian television during a Kremlin meeting with Jordan King Abdullah II. "What is happening in North Ossetia is horrible."

"It's horrible not only because some of the hostages are children but because this action can explode even a fragile balance of interconfessional and international relations in the region."

Heavily armed militants wearing masks descended on Middle School No. 1 shortly after 9 a.m. on the opening day of the new school year Wednesday. About a dozen people managed to escape by hiding in a boiler room, but hundreds of others were herded into the school gymnasium and some were placed at windows as human shields.

Camouflage-clad special forces troops carrying assault rifles encircled the school, while the militants placed a sniper on an upper floor of the three-story building. More than 1,000 people, including many parents, crowded outside police cordons demanding information and accusing the government of failing to protect their children.

Valery Andreyev, the Federal Security Service's chief in North Ossetia, said on NTV television that elders from Chechnya and Ingushetia had offered to come to the school and act as stand-in hostages so that women and children could be released. He also said that some of the militants had been identified, and investigators were attempting to find their relatives and bring them to the school to help in the negotiations. Two Arab television stations had also offered to negotiate, Andreyev said.

"Negotiations are continuing," he said.

From inside the school, the militants sent out a list of demands and threatened that if police intervened, they would kill 50 children for every hostage-taker killed and 20 children for every hostage-taker injured, Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the North Ossetia region's Interior Ministry, was quoted as telling the ITAR-Tass news agency. Dzugayev estimated there were between 15 and 24 militants.

How the police could end the standoff without a storming the building was unclear. The Moscow theater hostage-taking ended after an unidentified knockout gas was pumped into the building, but the gas was responsible for almost all of the 129 hostage deaths.

Gennady Gudkov, a retired Federal Security Service colonel and a member of the Russian parliament's defense committee, said there is little chance that authorities will resort to a knockout gas this time — particularly since medical experts said it tended to have a stronger effect on children.

The recent bloodshed is a blow to Putin, who pledged five years ago to crush Chechnya's rebels but instead has seen the insurgents increasingly strike civilian targets beyond the republic's borders.