Panic, pain mark end of Russia school siege
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-03 21:41

Half-naked and bloodied children ran terrified through the street, thirstily grabbing water bottles from medics as gunfire cracked, ambulance sirens sounded, and mothers and children wailed.

A man grieves over the body of a woman killed in a school seized by heavily armed masked men and women in the town of Beslan in the province of North Ossetia near Chechnya , September 3, 2004. [Reuters]

Russia's school siege ended in scenes of chaos and pandemonium Friday, with an unknown number of dead and injured among the up to 1,500 children and adults held at gunpoint by Chechen separatists for more than two days.

Bodies were found in the school and 400 were injured, according to Russian officials quoted by Itar-Tass news agency.

A reporter for British ITV television said its cameraman saw up to 100 bodies inside the school gym where most hostages were held..

A stream of ambulances left the school carrying bodies, many of which looked lifeless.

A boy cries as he sits in a car with his relatives after he was released from the school seized by heavily armed masked men and women in the town of Beslan in the province of North Ossetia near Chechnya, September 3, 2004. [Reuters]

"I smashed the window to get out," one young boy with a bandaged hand told Russian television. "People were running in all directions... They (the rebels) shot from the roof."

Six bodies lay covered with white sheets near the school gates, one the almost naked corpse of a girl of around 16 with an unnaturally pale face, another a young boy, less than a meter (three feet) in height.

Men and women filed past, hands covering their mouths, tentatively lifting the sheets to see if they recognized the bodies. A 40-year-old man wearing a light brown shirt kneeled by a body, crying into his hands.

REUNIONS

The lucky ones among the crowds of relatives who had waited day and night outside Middle School Number 1 held emotional reunions with children who had stripped to their underwear during two days in a stifling gym with little water and no food.

A man carries a boy who was injured in a school seized by heavily armed masked men and women in the town of Beslan in the province of North Ossetia near Chechnya , September 3, 2004. Up to 100 bodies were seen lying in a Russian school gymnasium after troops stormed the building to end a two-day siege, a British ITV News reporter said on Friday, after Russian soldiers battled Chechen separatists to end the two-day-old school siege as naked children ran out screaming amid explosions and machinegun fire.[Reuters]

A weeping mother stroked her child's blonde hair, a grandmother tended a young boy's bloodied face.

As the battle raged, at least some of the hostage-takers fled the school building in the southern city of Beslan and were pursued by Russian troops. Thick smoke rose over the school building.

Dozens of civilian cars rushed at high speed toward the school, some of them apparently commandeered by relatives desperate to find out what had happened inside the school.

Anger also flared in this Russian Orthodox part of the Caucasus mountains, ethnically and religiously distinct from the nearby Muslim regions of Chechnya and Ingushetia.

Two children are assisted near the school in southern Russia where militants were holding hundreds of people captive in Beslan, North Ossetia, in this image from television Friday, Sept. 3, 2004. Many were only partly clothed because of the stifling heat in the gymnasium where they had been held since the militants took the building. A group of about 30 women and children broke out of a school in southern Russia where militants were holding hundreds of people captive Friday, a news agency reported, after two loud explosions were heard and Russian commandos opened fire near the building. [AP]

A crowd of around 200 people started to attack a swarthy man who looked like he might be a Chechen, until police intervened, firing shots into the air to disperse them.

Others sought to organize care of the wounded at local hospitals where 1,000 beds had been prepared, health officials told the Interfax news agency.

"Everyone to the hospital! Quickly! The wounded will need blood!" shouted one policeman.

A woman in a pink dress, worn for the traditional festivities on the first day of school when the rebels seized the school, collapsed in a faint as she ran away and was bundled onto a khaki stretcher by military paramedics.

Dazed girls were still wearing decorative white hair bands and ribbons in their hair, now streaked with dirt -- their first day of school now a nightmarish memory.

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