Hundreds at Russian School Held

Attackers armed with guns and bombs seized a school in a region near Chechnya on Wednesday, holding as many as 354 students, teachers and others hostage and vowing to execute 50 children for any one of their comrades killed.

The crisis began as parents were dropping off their children, many dressed in new clothes for the first day of classes at Middle School No. 1. Police had to fight back parents who were desperate to get to their children.

As many as nine civilians were reported killed, including one hostage-taker and a father who ran after a child who was taken hostage, Russian officials said. At least 10 people were wounded.

“One body is lying near the entrance to the school. Two others are on the road near a fence. The attackers are not allowing anyone to collect the bodies. They open fire when anyone tries to approach them,” an unidentified official of the local Interior Ministry told Itar-Tass news agency.

The hostage-takers have vowed that “for every destroyed fighter, they will kill 50 children, and for every injured fighter, 20,” Kazbek Dzantiyev, interior minister for the republic of North Ossetia, told the agency.

Suspicion focused on rebels from the neighboring separatist republic of Chechnya -- and militants from neighboring Ingushetia -- who have been blamed for explosions that brought down two Russian planes last week and for other attacks that have killed hundreds of people in Russia in the last two years.

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, said the attackers were demanding the release of Chechen rebels and militants from Ingushetia who had been rounded up by police after an attack by insurgents in the Ingush capital in June. They also appeared to be demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya.

“Everything possible must be done to release these children, and we are doing it,” Peskov said. “But these demands are very big, very general. They are the kind of things that cannot be met” even if the government wanted to, he said.

Officials later told Russian news agencies that the hostage-takers demanded to speak with four people: North Ossetian President Aleksandr Dzasokhov; Ingushetian President Murat Zyazikov; a Chechen member of Russia’s parliament, Aslanbek Aslakhanov; and Moscow pediatrician Leonid Rochal.

Rochal played a key role as an intermediary in the 2002 seizure of Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater by Chechen militants, and he spoke to the attackers for several hours this time.

Russian news services said Rochal forwarded a government offer to guarantee the hostage-takers safe passage through Ingushetia to Chechnya, and another offer to exchange the child hostages for adults.

But those offers were apparently rejected, and the attackers hung up the phone at 3 a.m.

Putin sounded defiant after he quickly returned to Moscow from a holiday on the Black Sea.

“We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them,” he said, according to Interfax news agency.

Lev Dzugayev, a spokesman for the presidential administration in North Ossetia, said in a telephone interview that the attackers appeared to have herded the hostages into the school gymnasium and planted 15 to 20 explosive devices inside.

Authorities said there were about 17 attackers, some of them wearing explosive belts.

“For us right now, the biggest problem is to contain the civilians who are trying to get to the school. The entire town is out in the streets,” Dzugayev said.

Russia is reeling from a series of attacks that have occurred in little more than a week, including the near-simultaneous crashes of the two airliners, the killing of at least 19 police and troops in the Chechen capital of Grozny, a bus stop bombing and a suicide bomb attack near a downtown Moscow subway station.

At least 122 people have died since Aug. 21, in addition to at least 50 Chechen insurgents and an unknown number of civilians killed in raids by Russian troops in Grozny.

“In essence, war has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front,” Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov told journalists in Moscow.

None of the previous attacks matched the harrowing images of the school hostage crisis. Russian television showed a terrified girl of about 7 being dragged from the school in the initial minutes of the attack by an apparent rescuer in a flak jacket.

Authorities said several older students were able to escape early on after hiding in a boiler room.

One 14-year-old, who asked not to be identified because he still had a brother and a sister inside, said he was among 22 students who were able to run away just as the attack began.

It was about 20 minutes before school was to begin when “all of a sudden I heard some volleys of fire,” he said. “We moved to see what was happening, and I saw a man wearing a mask walking and firing in the air.”

Looking around, he saw about 15 attackers suddenly converge on the courtyard in front of the school, most of them men in camouflage but also three women in long black skirts and black masks or veils, he said.

“I realized what was going on and I ran away,” he said.

In an emergency session at the United Nations in New York, the Security Council condemned the hostage-taking, as well as the attacks on civilians in Moscow and on the Russian airliners. It demanded the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages, calling the attack a “heinous terrorist act.”

Hundreds of parents waited through the night at the town’s administration center near the school, sipping tea, whispering tearfully or simply sitting in stunned silence.

“All we wish for now is for our children to emerge alive,” said Irina Maliyeva, a physician whose 16-year-old daughter and a niece were inside the school. “No matter what demands these terrorists put forth, I think it’s well worth meeting them. These are children’s lives we’re talking about.”

Maliyeva said she had heard shots coming from the school not long after her daughter left home. Since it was the first day of classes, she assumed they were fireworks to celebrate the event. “Then I heard some cries and some inhuman shrieks. I ran out to the street and I could see children running away from the school in all possible directions.”

Stanislav Kesayev, vice speaker of the local parliament, told parents at a private briefing that authorities expected to get a videotape with the hostage-takers’ demands sometime today. He said the children apparently had not eaten because the attackers would not allow food to be delivered to the school.

At nearby Beslan Hospital, chief physician Vyacheslav Karginov said 13 injured adults were brought in about an hour after the shooting began. Two people had serious head and abdominal injuries, and six were treated and released. Among the injured, Karginov said, was a technical worker at the school who had jumped from a second-floor window.

Emma Tumayeva, whose adult daughter, 12-year-old grandson and 9-year-old granddaughter were among the hostages, wept as she described their departure for school.

“You should have seen them. They were in beautiful new clothes, and they were so happy to see their friends and teachers,” she said. “Then this shooting. They never came back.”

“Why are they doing this to us?” she said, her voice breaking. “We are not fighting with them. We are not attacking anybody. Our children are innocent.”

The hostage-takers reportedly gave authorities a cellphone number through which to contact them. Dzugayev, the spokesman for the North Ossetia presidential administration, said that in the single communication with the attackers so far, they spoke Russian with an accent.

“I don’t want to tell you which accent, so as not to incite ethnic hatred,” he said.

The incident recalled the October 2002 Dubrovka Theater seizure. Chechen militants wired the building with explosives and held an estimated 700 theatergoers and employees captive for three days before Russian security forces flooded the building with gas and swept in. At least 120 people died, including all of the hostage-takers.

Russia has been paralyzed in its attempts to quell the violence stemming from Chechnya, which has been at war with the federal government for most of the last 10 years in a bid for independence.

Sunday’s election of Chechen Interior Minister Alu Alkhanov as president was scheduled after the former president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was assassinated in May.

Rebels have refused to accept the Kremlin’s peace plan, which calls for installing a Chechen government friendly to Moscow and handing over limited autonomy and law enforcement control to Chechen security forces.

Branding the Chechen government and police traitors, the insurgents have launched regular attacks on Russian and Chechen forces within Chechnya, and over the last two years have widened the conflict to include attacks on civilians elsewhere in the country.

Their targets have included subway stations, an open-air music festival, trains, military hospitals and a landmark Moscow hotel across the street from Red Square.

The Islambouli Brigade, an Islamic group reportedly linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, took responsibility for the downing of the two passenger jets last week that killed all 90 people on board.

Russia has refused to negotiate with rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected president of Chechnya during the republic’s two-year period of de facto independence before war resumed in 1999. Maskhadov has consistently denounced attacks on civilians, but he took responsibility for directing the June attack on law enforcement officials in Ingushetia.

Maskhadov spokesman Umar Khambiyev released a statement Wednesday saying there was “no justification for this human action,” but adding that there was also no justification “for 42,000 Chechen schoolchildren killed by the Russian military under orders from the Kremlin and personally Putin.”

Putin returned to Moscow for the second time this week from his summer holiday on the Black Sea. Clearly frustrated, he had told reporters before the latest hostage-taking that Russia intended to remain firm in its policy on Chechnya.

President Bush, who was on a campaign trip Wednesday, called Putin before leaving the White House to offer support and assistance in the hostage crisis and to “let him know we stand with the Russian people.”

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters in Columbus, Ohio, where Bush campaigned, that the president “condemned in the strongest terms this kind of terrorism.”

Times staff writers Sergei L. Loiko in Moscow, Maggie Farley at the United Nations and Edwin Chen in Columbus contributed to this report.