http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/02/1093939077789.htmlTwo large explosions were heard today near the Russian school where rebels are holding some 330 people hostage for the third day, an AFP correspondent reported. After the second blast, armed volunteers began moving journalists and family members gathered near the school away from the scene.
The first explosion occurred some 500 metres from the school shortly after midnight and the second larger one seemed to go off slightly further away from the building.
No troops could immediately be seen moving toward the building from the spot where journalists were allowed to gather.
Militants released 31 women and children from the school as the crisis entered its third day, ITAR-Tass quoted local officials as saying.
“She’s alive, she’s alive – Alyonka’s OK,” one woman who was released said on Russian television, apparently reporting to relatives on a captive still inside.
Hundreds more remained trapped for a second day Thursday, held captive inside a brick-walled provincial school in this town in southern Russia by heavily armed militants who have threatened to blow up the building.
A gasp rose from the crowd pressed against barricades when Lev Dzugayev, an aide to the North Ossetian president, first announced the releases, prompting a crush as the crowd pushed toward him to find out who was freed.The announcement of names was a cruel lottery.
As a man with a megaphone identified of those released, some people in the crowed beamed with joy. Many more were left to cry.
In other footage, a burly man in blue camouflage carried a screaming infant wrapped in a blanket.
The releases came after hundreds of parents and relatives maintained a more than 24 hour vigil beyond the police barricades, which hide the school from site. As they wait to discover the fate of their loved ones, the entire community has ground to a halt.
Almost everyone in Beslan knows at least one hostage.
An earlier report from Agence France-Presse said an empty white bus had earlier entered the protected zone around the school.
The fifty-seater bus stopped 100 metres from the school building. Security forces guarding the entrance to the zone refused to say why it had appeared.
Lev Dzugayev, an aide to the North Ossetian president, called the release “the first success” and expressed hope for further progress in talks with the captors.
Regional parliamentary spokeswoman Fatima Kabalova said that several elderly women and a group of children were released, but gave no numbers and did not indicate whether she was referring to the infants released. She said the releases were not announced publicly to avoid a crush from media and anxious relatives.
The releases came amid heightened tension after two large explosions roared out this afternoon, followed by a plume of black smoke rising from the vicinity of the school. The rescue operation’s headquarters said militants in the school fired grenade launchers at two cars that had apparently driven too close to the building.
Neither car was hit, the headquarters said, but eyewitnesses said they saw a gutted car that apparently had been hit, about 100 metres from the school.
Earlier yesterday, President Vladimir Putin pledged to do everything possible to save the lives of the hostages. The militants had reportedly threatened to blow up the building if authorities stormed it, and warned that they would kill hostages if any of their gang was hurt or injured.
In his first public remarks since the hostage-taking on Wednesday morning, Mr Putin said: “Our main task is, of course, to save the life and health of those who became hostages.”
As negotiators scrambled to find a way out of the tense standoff, crowds of distraught relatives and townspeople waited helplessly for news of their neighbours and loved ones, their distress sharpened by the sporadic rattle of gunfire from the cordoned-off crisis site.
But as talks via phone continued on and off throughout the night and morning, details about who the militants are and what they wanted remained unclear.
Well-known paediatrician Leonid Roshal, who aided hostages during the deadly seizure of a Moscow theatre by Chechens in 2002, was leading the talks.
Russia’s NTV television reported that Dr Roshal, whose participation the militants had demanded, conveyed to the hostage-takers the promise of a safe corridor out but the offer was refused.
Mr Dzugayev said that so far the talks had not achieved anything.
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 and suspicion in the raid fell on Chechen militants although no claim of responsibility has been made.
An official in the joint-command operation for the crisis said on condition of anonymity early yesterday 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 – and 13 others wounded.
One of the dead was a pupil’s parent who tried to resist the attackers. Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of North Ossetia’s Interior Ministry, told ITAR-Tass that 12 people were killed, though some other casualty reports have differed.
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.
The series of attacks were seen as a blow to Mr Putin, who cut short his working holiday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to return to Moscow and postponed a planned two-day visit to Turkey, due to start yesterday. But his delay in making a public statement was characteristic – as was his decision to comment on the seizure during a meeting with visiting Jordan King Abdullah II rather than in a direct address to the nation.
In remarks broadcast on Russian television, Mr Putin said: “We understand these acts are not only against private citizens of Russia but against Russia as a whole.
“What is happening in North Ossetia is horrible,” he said. “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 interethnic relations in the region.”
Heavily-armed militants wearing masks descended on Middle School No. 1 shortly after 9am on the opening day of the new school year on 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.
Mr Dzugayev said 354 people were seized.
Little was known about food and sanitary condition inside the school; offers to deliver food and water to the hostages were turned down, adding to the distress of the more than 2000 waiting relatives and friends outside.
Mr Putin pledged five years ago to crush Chechnya’s rebels but instead has seen the insurgents increasingly strike civilian targets beyond the republic’s borders.