Terrorist hold 400-AP, or 120 AFP)Hundreds Held Hostage in Russia School

[papau]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=1&u=/ap/20040901/ap_on_re_eu/russia_school_seizure

Hundreds Held Hostage in Russia School

By JIM HEINTZ, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW - 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. <snip>