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.