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[Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

Pretty stupid of Chechen Jehadists, good for U.S. getting more 
cooperation from Putin against our guerrilla attackers.

Children have always been about the highest priority of Russians.  When 
there was little money for anything else, there were hundreds of 
thousands of State-run neighborhood day-care centers (that the U.S. 
still can't afford?), so mothers could join the workforce without 
wondering what was happening to their kids.

I would expect this outrage to have savage repercussions.  In the old 
days the entire populace of Chechnya would have been rounded up and in 
thousands of trainloads, sent to Siberian Gulags, ending the Chechnya 
attacks in Russia once and for all.

**

Published: September 1, 2004

*Filed at 7:52 a.m. ET*

MOSCOW (AP) -- Attackers wearing suicide-bomb belts seized a school in a 
Russian region bordering Chechnya on Wednesday, taking hostage about 400 
people -- half of them children -- and threatening to blow up the 
building. At least two people were killed, one of them a parent who 
resisted an attacker.

The hostage-takers reportedly released 15 children several hours later, 
the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. No further details were immediately 
available.

President Vladimir Putin interrupted his working holiday in the Black 
Sea resort of Sochi and returned to the capital. Upon arrival at the 
Moscow airport, he held an immediate meeting with the heads of Russia's 
Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service, the Interfax news agency 
said.

The seizure began after a ceremony marking the first day of the Russian 
school year, when it was likely that many parents had accompanied their 
children to the facility which covers grades 1-11. The attackers 
forwarned they would blow up the school if police tried to storm it and 
forced children to stand at the windows, said Alexei Polyansky, a police 
spokesman for southern Russia.

Suspicion in both the school attack and the Moscow bombing fell on 
Chechen rebels or their sympathizers, but there was no evidence of any 
direct link. The two strikes came just a week after two Russian planes 
carrying 90 people crashed almost simultaneously in what officials also 
say were terrorist bombings.