Beslan...:cry:
Thursday, 24. January 2008, 18:30:46
The Beslan school hostage crisis (also referred to as the Beslan school siege or Beslan massacre) began when a group of at least ten armed Chechen separatists and supporters took more than 1,200 schoolchildren and adults hostage on September 1, 2004, at School Number One (SNO) in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania, (an autonomous republic in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation). On the third day of the standoff, a chaotic gunbattle broke out between the hostage-takers and Russian security forces. Three hundred thirty-four (334) civilians were killed, including 186 children, and hundreds more were wounded. Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev took responsibility for the hostage taking.
There are many aspects of the crisis still in dispute, including how many militants were involved, whether weapons and ammunition had been hidden in the school prior to the siege, and whether some of the militants had escaped. Questions about the government's management of the crisis have also persisted, including the nature and content of negotiations with the militants, the responsibility for the bloody outcome, and the use of heavy weapons by the government forces
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Day 1
Background
The initial attack took place on September 1, the traditional start of the Russian school year, referred to as "First September" or "Day of Knowledge."[3] On this day, the children, accompanied by their parents and other relatives, attend ceremonies hosted by their school. It is traditional for the first-year students to give flowers to those entering their final year, and to then be taken to class by the older children.
Comintern Street SNO, located next to the district police station, was one of seven schools in Beslan, with 59 teachers and several support staff, and 900 pupils between the ages of six and eighteen. The gymnasium, where most of the estimated 1,200 hostages were to spend 56 hours, was a recent addition. It measured 10 metres wide and 25 metres long.
Because of the older pupils and family members attending the Day of Knowledge festivities, the number of people in the school at the time of the attack was considerably higher than usual for a normal school day.
Hostage-taking
At 09:30 local time, a group of approximately 32 heavily-armed attackers wearing military camouflage uniforms and black ski masks, and in some cases wearing explosive belts, arrived at SNO in a stolen police GAZ van and a GAZ-66 military truck. At first, some mistook the attackers for Russian forces practicing a security drill. However, the attackers resolved this misconception by shooting in the air and forcing everybody into the school. During the initial chaos, up to 50 people managed to flee and alert authorities to the situation.
After an exchange of gunfire with local police and an armed civilian (Ruslan Gapoyev, who was killed in the exchange), in which it was reported one attacker was shot, the attackers seized the school building, taking approximately 1,300 hostages. The attackers herded the hostages into the school's gym, and confiscated all mobile phones; one of the female rebels stated that if she found anyone hiding a phone, she would kill that person and three others. They ordered everyone to speak in Russian and only when spoken to. When a father named Ruslan Betrozov stood to calm people and repeat the rules in the local language, Ossetic, a gunman approached and killed him with a single shot to the head. Another father named Vadim Bolloyev, who refused to kneel, was also shot and then bled to death.
After gathering the hostages in the gym, the attackers took several small groups of the adult male hostages (about 15 to 22 men total), reportedly those perceived by them as the strongest ones, into another room and then shot at them with automatic rifles, killing all but two of them. One man named Aslan Kudzayev survived by jumping out the window and escaping (the authorities briefly detained him as a suspected terrorist). The attackers then forced other hostages to throw the bodies out of the building and to wash the blood off the floor.
ITAR-TASS reported that a local police source had told them that men disguised as repairmen had concealed weapons and explosives in the school in July 2004, but this version of events was later officially refuted. However, some witnesses have since come forward claiming they were made to help their captors remove the hidden weapon caches from the school. There are also claims that they constructed a sniper's nest in advance on the gymnasium roof.
That night, the hostage takers began exploring the area surrounding the school, preparing for an exit strategy once their demands had been met.
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This school...
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Day 2
On September 2, 2004, negotiations between Roshal and the hostage-takers proved unsuccessful, and they refused to allow food, water, and medicines to be taken in for the hostages, or for the bodies of the dead to be removed from the front of the school.
By day two, the lack of food and water took its toll on the young children, many of whom were forced to stand for long periods in the hot, tightly-packed gym. Many children took off their clothing because of the sweltering heat within the gymnasium, which led to rumors of sexual impropriety, though the hostages later explained it was merely due to the stifling heat and being denied any water. Many children fainted, and parents feared they would die. Occasionally, the militants (many of whom took off their masks) took out some of the unconscious children and poured water on their heads before returning them to the gym. Later in the day, some adults also started to faint from fatigue and thirst. Because of the conditions in the gym, when the explosion and gun battle began on the third day, many of the surviving children were so fatigued that they were barely able to flee from the carnage.
In the afternoon, the gunmen let the Ingushetia President Ruslan Aushev to enter the school building and released 26 hostages, 11 nursing women and 15 children, personally to him. The rebels gave Aushev a note with demands from their leader Shamil Basayev who was not himself present in Beslan. The existence of the note was kept secret by the Russian authorities. It was falsely announced that the hostage takers made no demands. Basayev demanded recognition of a "formal independence for Chechnya" that "would remain in the ruble zone, and would join the Commonwealth of Independent States". He also said that "although the Chechen rebels had played no part in the 1999 apartment building bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk", they would publicly take responsibility for them.
At around 15:30, two grenades were fired approximately ten minutes apart by the hostage-takers at security forces outside the school, setting a police car ablaze, but the 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 with being shot if they would not stop crying.[5] Russian authorities claimed that the hostage-takers had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up."
There were no reported deaths on September 2.
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It is the list of all people, who died this day...=(
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Day 3
Versions of the initial events
Rough plan of school showing removal vehicle and damaged gymAround 13:04 on September 3, 2004, the hostage-takers agreed to allow Emergency Ministry servicemen to remove bodies from the school grounds. However, when the servicemen approached the school, explosions were heard from the gymnasium and the hostage-takers opened fire. Two of the servicemen were killed, while the rest took cover. Part of the gymnasium wall was demolished by the explosions, allowing a group of about 30 hostages to escape, though a number were killed as a result of crossfire between the hostage-takers and the army.
Presidential advisor Aslambek Aslakhanov said that the cause of the firing and the subsequent storming of the school had been an accidental explosion.[29] According to an early version, one of the bombs had been insecurely attached with adhesive tape, had fallen, and then exploded.[30]
Ruslan Aushev, a key negotiator during the siege, told the Novaya Gazeta that an initial explosion was set off by a hostage-taker accidentally tripping over a wire. As a result, armed civilians, some of them apparently fathers of the hostages, started shooting. Reportedly, no security forces or hostage-takers were shooting at this point, but Aushev concluded that the gunfire led the hostage-takers to believe that the school was being stormed.
According to a third version, a special forces sniper shot a hostage-taker whose foot was on a dead-man detonator, triggering the first blasts.
A fourth version put forward by Duma member and weapons and explosives expert Yuri Savelyev claims that the exchange of gunfire was not begun by explosions within the school building but by two special rocket-propelled grenades fired by the Russian forces into the building, and that the home-made explosive devices installed by the rebels did not explode at all. Savelyev, a dissenting Torshin commission member, claims these explosions killed many of the hostages and dozens more died in the resulting fire.[33] Yuri Ivanov, another parliamentary investigator, further contended that the grenades were fired on the direct orders of President Putin.]
In a fifth version, Alexander Torshin of a Russian parliamentary commission said the terrorists had started the battle by intentionally detonating bombs among the hostages, to the surprise of Russian negotiators and commanders. That statement went beyond previous government accounts, which have typically said the bombs exploded in an unexplained accident.
The government asserts that once the shooting started, soldiers had no choice but to storm the building. However, most of the town's residents have refuted that official version of events. According to the official statements, the order to start the operation was given by the republican FSB leader Valery Andreyev.
Storming by the Russian forces
Russian special forces, fired powerful RPO-A Shmel (Bumblebee) rockets at the school's roof and attic, setting parts of the school ablaze (a total of nine empty disposable tubes were later found on the rooftops of nearby apartment blocks). A chaotic battle broke out as two special forces groups fought to enter the school and militants counterattacked. The assault forces included the assault groups of the FSB OSNAZ, and the associated troops of the Russian Army and the Russian Interior Ministry, supported by several tanks from the Russia's 58th Army, BTR-80 wheeled armoured personnel carriers, and at least one Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunship.
Witnesses and journalists saw two T-72 tanks advance on the school that afternoon, at least one of which fired its main gun several times; the tank unit commander testified the tank fired "one blank shot and six antipersonnel-high explosive shells" on orders from the FSB.[38] The Russian government later defended the use of tanks and other heavy weaponry, arguing that it was used after surviving hostages escaped from the school. However, this contradicts the eyewitness accounts (including Associated Press reporters, photographers and videographers), as many hostages were seriously wounded and could not possibly escape by themselves, and others were kept by the militants as human shields, particularly in the area of the school cafeteria.
Many local civilians also joined in the chaotic battle, having brought along their own weapons. At the same time, regular conscript soldiers reportedly fled the scene as the fighting began.[39] The civilians claimed that the local police also panicked, apparently firing in the wrong direction. At least one of the armed volunteers is known to have been killed.
By 15:00, two hours after the assault began, Russian troops claimed control of most of the school. However, fighting was still continuing on the grounds as evening fell, including a machine-gunner firing from an upper floor, and a group holding out in the basement. During the battle, a group of 13 hostage-takers broke through the military cordon and took refuge nearby (reportedly, the group included two women who tried to pass themselves off as medical personnel, contradicting the version according to which there were only two female militants who died during the standoff). Several hostage-takers were believed to have entered a two-story building nearby. This building was destroyed by tanks and flamethrowers around 21:00, according to the Ossetian committee's report.
Firefighters, who were called two hours after the fire started, were not prepared to battle the blaze that consumed the gymnasium; one old fire truck arrived two hours after the start of the fire, reportedly without water. Few ambulances were available to transport the hundreds of injured victims, who were driven in private cars. One suspected terrorist was lynched on the scene by a mob of civilians, an event filmed by the Sky News crew,[43] while an unarmed militant was captured alive by the OMON troops while trying to hide under their truck (later identified as Nur-Pashi Kulayev).
Sporadic explosions and gunfire continued at night despite reports that all resistance by militants has been suppressed. These did not end until 12 hours after the first explosions.
Aftermath
Russia's deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Fridinsky said that 31 of the 32 hostage-takers had been confirmed dead and one had been captured alive. During the operation, at least 11 soldiers of the OSNAZ special forces groups Alfa and Vympel were killed, among them the commander of Alfa, while more than 30 suffered wounds of varying severity. It was the highest official number of casualties in a single engagement in the history of these units.
Many of the injured died in the crumbling only hospital in Beslan, badly unprepared to cope with the casualties, before the patients were sent to better-equipped facilities in Vladikavkaz.Many survivors remained in severe shock and at least one female former hostage committed suicide after returning home. The Russian government has been heavily criticized by many of the local people who, days after the end of the siege, did not know whether their children were alive or dead. Some human remains were even found by a local man in the nearby garbage dump several months after the crisis, which prompted further outrage.
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Casualties
Official fatalities
Hostages 334
Police and civilians 8
Emergency workers 2
Special forces 11+
Hostage-takers 31
Total 386+
-
Official wounded
Special forces 55
Other 728
Total 783
At least 396 people, mostly hostages, were killed during the crisis. The first of the many funerals were conducted on September 4, the day after the final assault, with more the following Sunday, and mass burials of 120 people on Monday. The local cemetery was too small and had to be expanded to an adjacent plot of land to accommodate the dead.
The exact number of people that received ambulatory assistance immediately after the crisis is not known, but is estimated to be around 700. Moscow-based military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer in a September 7, 2004 Moscow Times column concluded that 90% of the hostages had sustained injuries. After their release, 437 people, including 221 children, were hospitalized. 197 children were taken to the Children’s Republican Clinical Hospital in the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz, and thirty were in resuscitation units in critical condition. Another 150 people were transferred to the Vladikavkaz Emergency Hospital. Sixty-two people, including twelve children, were treated in two local hospitals in Beslan. Six children with heavy wounds were flown to Moscow for specialist treatment. The majority of the children were treated for burns, gunshot and shrapnel wounds, and mutilation caused by mines and bombs. Some had to have amputations and eyes removed. Many children were permanently disabled by injuries sustained during their captivity. The sudden influx of large numbers of injured placed a severe strain on the local health service. There was an inadequate supply of hospital beds, medication, and neurosurgery equipment. One month after the attack, 240 people (160 of them children) were still being treated in hospitals in Vladikavkaz and in Beslan. Surviving children and parents have received psychological treatment at Vladikavkaz Rehabilitation Centre.
Later, it was reported that an unknown number of survivors may have died as a result of a government-ordered countermeasure, called Naloxone, meant to counter the effects of Fentanyl-based drugs in the case of the Moscow-type scenario of the storming. The latest reported fatality is 33-year-old librarian Yelena Avdonina, who on December 8, 2006, succumbed to wounds sustained during the siege.
It is not known how many members of Russia's elite special forces died in the fighting, as official figures range from 11 to more than 20 killed. The number on the memorial in Beslan is only 10. These killed included all three commanders of the assault group: Colonel Oleg Ilyin and Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Ratzumovsky of Vympel, and Major Alexander Petrov of Alfa.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a two-day period of national mourning for September 6 and September 7, 2004. On the second day of mourning, 135,000 people joined a government-organised rally against terrorism on the Red Square in Moscow. Putin cancelled planned meetings with German chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Hamburg and in the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein.
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What said terrorists -
ALL PHOTOS YOU CAN SEE HERE - http://beslan-2004.front.ru/ WHILE CLICKING THE PICTURE UT WILL BE BIGGER.
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There are many aspects of the crisis still in dispute, including how many militants were involved, whether weapons and ammunition had been hidden in the school prior to the siege, and whether some of the militants had escaped. Questions about the government's management of the crisis have also persisted, including the nature and content of negotiations with the militants, the responsibility for the bloody outcome, and the use of heavy weapons by the government forces
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Day 1
Background
The initial attack took place on September 1, the traditional start of the Russian school year, referred to as "First September" or "Day of Knowledge."[3] On this day, the children, accompanied by their parents and other relatives, attend ceremonies hosted by their school. It is traditional for the first-year students to give flowers to those entering their final year, and to then be taken to class by the older children.
Comintern Street SNO, located next to the district police station, was one of seven schools in Beslan, with 59 teachers and several support staff, and 900 pupils between the ages of six and eighteen. The gymnasium, where most of the estimated 1,200 hostages were to spend 56 hours, was a recent addition. It measured 10 metres wide and 25 metres long.
Because of the older pupils and family members attending the Day of Knowledge festivities, the number of people in the school at the time of the attack was considerably higher than usual for a normal school day.
Hostage-taking
At 09:30 local time, a group of approximately 32 heavily-armed attackers wearing military camouflage uniforms and black ski masks, and in some cases wearing explosive belts, arrived at SNO in a stolen police GAZ van and a GAZ-66 military truck. At first, some mistook the attackers for Russian forces practicing a security drill. However, the attackers resolved this misconception by shooting in the air and forcing everybody into the school. During the initial chaos, up to 50 people managed to flee and alert authorities to the situation.
After an exchange of gunfire with local police and an armed civilian (Ruslan Gapoyev, who was killed in the exchange), in which it was reported one attacker was shot, the attackers seized the school building, taking approximately 1,300 hostages. The attackers herded the hostages into the school's gym, and confiscated all mobile phones; one of the female rebels stated that if she found anyone hiding a phone, she would kill that person and three others. They ordered everyone to speak in Russian and only when spoken to. When a father named Ruslan Betrozov stood to calm people and repeat the rules in the local language, Ossetic, a gunman approached and killed him with a single shot to the head. Another father named Vadim Bolloyev, who refused to kneel, was also shot and then bled to death.
After gathering the hostages in the gym, the attackers took several small groups of the adult male hostages (about 15 to 22 men total), reportedly those perceived by them as the strongest ones, into another room and then shot at them with automatic rifles, killing all but two of them. One man named Aslan Kudzayev survived by jumping out the window and escaping (the authorities briefly detained him as a suspected terrorist). The attackers then forced other hostages to throw the bodies out of the building and to wash the blood off the floor.
ITAR-TASS reported that a local police source had told them that men disguised as repairmen had concealed weapons and explosives in the school in July 2004, but this version of events was later officially refuted. However, some witnesses have since come forward claiming they were made to help their captors remove the hidden weapon caches from the school. There are also claims that they constructed a sniper's nest in advance on the gymnasium roof.
That night, the hostage takers began exploring the area surrounding the school, preparing for an exit strategy once their demands had been met.
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This school...------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Day 2
On September 2, 2004, negotiations between Roshal and the hostage-takers proved unsuccessful, and they refused to allow food, water, and medicines to be taken in for the hostages, or for the bodies of the dead to be removed from the front of the school.
By day two, the lack of food and water took its toll on the young children, many of whom were forced to stand for long periods in the hot, tightly-packed gym. Many children took off their clothing because of the sweltering heat within the gymnasium, which led to rumors of sexual impropriety, though the hostages later explained it was merely due to the stifling heat and being denied any water. Many children fainted, and parents feared they would die. Occasionally, the militants (many of whom took off their masks) took out some of the unconscious children and poured water on their heads before returning them to the gym. Later in the day, some adults also started to faint from fatigue and thirst. Because of the conditions in the gym, when the explosion and gun battle began on the third day, many of the surviving children were so fatigued that they were barely able to flee from the carnage.
In the afternoon, the gunmen let the Ingushetia President Ruslan Aushev to enter the school building and released 26 hostages, 11 nursing women and 15 children, personally to him. The rebels gave Aushev a note with demands from their leader Shamil Basayev who was not himself present in Beslan. The existence of the note was kept secret by the Russian authorities. It was falsely announced that the hostage takers made no demands. Basayev demanded recognition of a "formal independence for Chechnya" that "would remain in the ruble zone, and would join the Commonwealth of Independent States". He also said that "although the Chechen rebels had played no part in the 1999 apartment building bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk", they would publicly take responsibility for them.
At around 15:30, two grenades were fired approximately ten minutes apart by the hostage-takers at security forces outside the school, setting a police car ablaze, but the 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 with being shot if they would not stop crying.[5] Russian authorities claimed that the hostage-takers had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up."
There were no reported deaths on September 2.
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It is the list of all people, who died this day...=(------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Day 3
Versions of the initial events
Rough plan of school showing removal vehicle and damaged gymAround 13:04 on September 3, 2004, the hostage-takers agreed to allow Emergency Ministry servicemen to remove bodies from the school grounds. However, when the servicemen approached the school, explosions were heard from the gymnasium and the hostage-takers opened fire. Two of the servicemen were killed, while the rest took cover. Part of the gymnasium wall was demolished by the explosions, allowing a group of about 30 hostages to escape, though a number were killed as a result of crossfire between the hostage-takers and the army.
Presidential advisor Aslambek Aslakhanov said that the cause of the firing and the subsequent storming of the school had been an accidental explosion.[29] According to an early version, one of the bombs had been insecurely attached with adhesive tape, had fallen, and then exploded.[30]
Ruslan Aushev, a key negotiator during the siege, told the Novaya Gazeta that an initial explosion was set off by a hostage-taker accidentally tripping over a wire. As a result, armed civilians, some of them apparently fathers of the hostages, started shooting. Reportedly, no security forces or hostage-takers were shooting at this point, but Aushev concluded that the gunfire led the hostage-takers to believe that the school was being stormed.
According to a third version, a special forces sniper shot a hostage-taker whose foot was on a dead-man detonator, triggering the first blasts.
A fourth version put forward by Duma member and weapons and explosives expert Yuri Savelyev claims that the exchange of gunfire was not begun by explosions within the school building but by two special rocket-propelled grenades fired by the Russian forces into the building, and that the home-made explosive devices installed by the rebels did not explode at all. Savelyev, a dissenting Torshin commission member, claims these explosions killed many of the hostages and dozens more died in the resulting fire.[33] Yuri Ivanov, another parliamentary investigator, further contended that the grenades were fired on the direct orders of President Putin.]
In a fifth version, Alexander Torshin of a Russian parliamentary commission said the terrorists had started the battle by intentionally detonating bombs among the hostages, to the surprise of Russian negotiators and commanders. That statement went beyond previous government accounts, which have typically said the bombs exploded in an unexplained accident.
The government asserts that once the shooting started, soldiers had no choice but to storm the building. However, most of the town's residents have refuted that official version of events. According to the official statements, the order to start the operation was given by the republican FSB leader Valery Andreyev.
Storming by the Russian forces
Russian special forces, fired powerful RPO-A Shmel (Bumblebee) rockets at the school's roof and attic, setting parts of the school ablaze (a total of nine empty disposable tubes were later found on the rooftops of nearby apartment blocks). A chaotic battle broke out as two special forces groups fought to enter the school and militants counterattacked. The assault forces included the assault groups of the FSB OSNAZ, and the associated troops of the Russian Army and the Russian Interior Ministry, supported by several tanks from the Russia's 58th Army, BTR-80 wheeled armoured personnel carriers, and at least one Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunship.
Witnesses and journalists saw two T-72 tanks advance on the school that afternoon, at least one of which fired its main gun several times; the tank unit commander testified the tank fired "one blank shot and six antipersonnel-high explosive shells" on orders from the FSB.[38] The Russian government later defended the use of tanks and other heavy weaponry, arguing that it was used after surviving hostages escaped from the school. However, this contradicts the eyewitness accounts (including Associated Press reporters, photographers and videographers), as many hostages were seriously wounded and could not possibly escape by themselves, and others were kept by the militants as human shields, particularly in the area of the school cafeteria.
Many local civilians also joined in the chaotic battle, having brought along their own weapons. At the same time, regular conscript soldiers reportedly fled the scene as the fighting began.[39] The civilians claimed that the local police also panicked, apparently firing in the wrong direction. At least one of the armed volunteers is known to have been killed.
By 15:00, two hours after the assault began, Russian troops claimed control of most of the school. However, fighting was still continuing on the grounds as evening fell, including a machine-gunner firing from an upper floor, and a group holding out in the basement. During the battle, a group of 13 hostage-takers broke through the military cordon and took refuge nearby (reportedly, the group included two women who tried to pass themselves off as medical personnel, contradicting the version according to which there were only two female militants who died during the standoff). Several hostage-takers were believed to have entered a two-story building nearby. This building was destroyed by tanks and flamethrowers around 21:00, according to the Ossetian committee's report.
Firefighters, who were called two hours after the fire started, were not prepared to battle the blaze that consumed the gymnasium; one old fire truck arrived two hours after the start of the fire, reportedly without water. Few ambulances were available to transport the hundreds of injured victims, who were driven in private cars. One suspected terrorist was lynched on the scene by a mob of civilians, an event filmed by the Sky News crew,[43] while an unarmed militant was captured alive by the OMON troops while trying to hide under their truck (later identified as Nur-Pashi Kulayev).
Sporadic explosions and gunfire continued at night despite reports that all resistance by militants has been suppressed. These did not end until 12 hours after the first explosions.
Aftermath
Russia's deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Fridinsky said that 31 of the 32 hostage-takers had been confirmed dead and one had been captured alive. During the operation, at least 11 soldiers of the OSNAZ special forces groups Alfa and Vympel were killed, among them the commander of Alfa, while more than 30 suffered wounds of varying severity. It was the highest official number of casualties in a single engagement in the history of these units.
Many of the injured died in the crumbling only hospital in Beslan, badly unprepared to cope with the casualties, before the patients were sent to better-equipped facilities in Vladikavkaz.Many survivors remained in severe shock and at least one female former hostage committed suicide after returning home. The Russian government has been heavily criticized by many of the local people who, days after the end of the siege, did not know whether their children were alive or dead. Some human remains were even found by a local man in the nearby garbage dump several months after the crisis, which prompted further outrage.
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Casualties
Official fatalities
Hostages 334
Police and civilians 8
Emergency workers 2
Special forces 11+
Hostage-takers 31
Total 386+
-
Official wounded
Special forces 55
Other 728
Total 783
At least 396 people, mostly hostages, were killed during the crisis. The first of the many funerals were conducted on September 4, the day after the final assault, with more the following Sunday, and mass burials of 120 people on Monday. The local cemetery was too small and had to be expanded to an adjacent plot of land to accommodate the dead.
The exact number of people that received ambulatory assistance immediately after the crisis is not known, but is estimated to be around 700. Moscow-based military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer in a September 7, 2004 Moscow Times column concluded that 90% of the hostages had sustained injuries. After their release, 437 people, including 221 children, were hospitalized. 197 children were taken to the Children’s Republican Clinical Hospital in the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz, and thirty were in resuscitation units in critical condition. Another 150 people were transferred to the Vladikavkaz Emergency Hospital. Sixty-two people, including twelve children, were treated in two local hospitals in Beslan. Six children with heavy wounds were flown to Moscow for specialist treatment. The majority of the children were treated for burns, gunshot and shrapnel wounds, and mutilation caused by mines and bombs. Some had to have amputations and eyes removed. Many children were permanently disabled by injuries sustained during their captivity. The sudden influx of large numbers of injured placed a severe strain on the local health service. There was an inadequate supply of hospital beds, medication, and neurosurgery equipment. One month after the attack, 240 people (160 of them children) were still being treated in hospitals in Vladikavkaz and in Beslan. Surviving children and parents have received psychological treatment at Vladikavkaz Rehabilitation Centre.
Later, it was reported that an unknown number of survivors may have died as a result of a government-ordered countermeasure, called Naloxone, meant to counter the effects of Fentanyl-based drugs in the case of the Moscow-type scenario of the storming. The latest reported fatality is 33-year-old librarian Yelena Avdonina, who on December 8, 2006, succumbed to wounds sustained during the siege.
It is not known how many members of Russia's elite special forces died in the fighting, as official figures range from 11 to more than 20 killed. The number on the memorial in Beslan is only 10. These killed included all three commanders of the assault group: Colonel Oleg Ilyin and Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Ratzumovsky of Vympel, and Major Alexander Petrov of Alfa.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a two-day period of national mourning for September 6 and September 7, 2004. On the second day of mourning, 135,000 people joined a government-organised rally against terrorism on the Red Square in Moscow. Putin cancelled planned meetings with German chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Hamburg and in the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein.
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What said terrorists -
We request the republic's president Dzasokhov, the president of Ingushetia Ziazikov, the children's doctor Rashailo for negotiations. If anyone of us is killed, we'll shoot 50 people. If anyone of us is wounded, we'll kill 20 people. If 5 of us are killed, we'll blow up everything. If the light, communication are cut off for a minute, we'll shoot 10 people.
ALL PHOTOS YOU CAN SEE HERE - http://beslan-2004.front.ru/ WHILE CLICKING THE PICTURE UT WILL BE BIGGER.
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My number is 513767!
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