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TV footage shows Russian school siege ordeal
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-08 07:56
A Russian television network showed footage from inside the school raided by
militants last week, depicting hooded attackers in a gymnasium crowded with
hostages and strung up with explosives attached to wires.
Hostages sit on the
floor, surrounding a hostage-taker working on what appears to be an
explosive device, at the school in Beslan, Russia, in this image taken
from a video made on an unknown date during the early part of the school
siege which began on Sept. 1, 2004. [AP]
A video grab image shows a militant with a
child being held hostage in the gym of the school in Beslan, Russia, which
was shot by the militants on the first day of the siege and released on
September 7, 2004. | The footage, which NTV
television said was from a videotape recorded by the assailants, showed what
appeared to be hundreds of hostages crowded around the walls of the cramped
room, many with their hands behind their heads and some fanning themselves in
the heat.
Football-sized cylindrical bundles that looked like explosives were attached
to wires and strings hanging from a basketball hoop and other parts of the rooms
— with one resting inside the net — and one attacker in camouflage and a black
hood stood with a boot on what NTV said was a book rigged with a detonator.
A thick red streak across the center of the floor appeared to be from blood,
as if someone bleeding had been dragged across the wooden surface.
A video grab image
shows pupils and adults in the gym of the school in Beslan, Russia, which
was shot by the militants during the siege and released on September 7,
2004. Russia's NTV television showed graphic footage shot by the militants
who took more than a thousand hostages in a school in Beslan in the south
of the country last week. [Reuters]
A video grab image shows objects and wires
attached to a basketball hoop in the gym of the school in Beslan, Russia,
which was shot by the militants during the siege and released on September
7, 2004. [Reuters] | The hostages pictured
included women, children and men, and NTV estimated there were some 1,000 in the
gym. At one point, a voice in Russian, apparently an attacker, said "Wait, don't
bring the children in here."
A woman, clad head-to-toe in black, stood in a doorway holding a pistol
alongside her head, and there was footage of what appeared to be a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher lying on a floor. Another assailant, dressed
in black with a camouflage masked, had an automatic rifle.
NTV did not say how it had obtained the tape, which it said was probably
recorded on the first day of the crisis at School No. 1 in the southern city of
Beslan, shortly after the attackers seized the building, herded hostages into
the gym and rigged explosives.
The footage showed one attacker fiddling with wires attached to what appeared
to a bomb the size and shape of a small suitcase.
At the end of the brief footage, a voice is heard speaking quietly into a
phone in a language that does not sound like Russian.
The bloody finale of the three-day crisis, which killed more than 350 people
including hostage-takers, came after explosions of what some hostages said were
bombs in the gym.
A video grab image
shows what appears to be a female militant in the gym of the school in
Beslan, Russia, which was shot by the militants on the first day of the
siege and released on September 7, 2004. [Reuters]
A video grab
image shows pupils and adults in the gym of the school in Beslan, Russia,
which was shot by the militants during the siege and released on September
7, 2004. [Reuters] |
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