Beslan School Views

General Goods

Comintern Street SNO was one of seven schools in Beslan, a town of around 35,000 people in the republic of North Ossetia-Alania, Russian Caucasus. The school, located right next to the district police station, had around 60 teachers and more than 800 students.[17] Its gymnasium, where most of the estimated 1,200 hostages were to spend 52 hours of captivity, was a recent addition, measuring 10 metres wide and 25 metres long.[18] There were reports that the men disguised as repairmen had concealed weapons and explosives in the school sometime during July 2004, but this was later officially refuted. However, several witnesses have since testified they were made to help their captors remove the weapons from the caches hidden in the school.[19][20] There were also claims that the militants or their accomplices constructed a sniper's nest position on the sports hall roof in advance.[21]

It was also reported that the SNO in Beslan was used by Ossetian militia forces as an internment camp for ethnic Ingush civilians in late 1992 during the short but bloody Ingush–Ossetian East Prigorodny conflict, in which hundreds of Ingush residents of North Ossetia lost their lives or disappeared during the week-long hostilities, and thus the school was arguably chosen as the target of the attack by the mostly-Ingush rebel group because of this connection.[22][23][24] According to media reports, SNO was one of several buildings in which the Ossetians had held Ingush citizens, many of them women and children; the hostages sat on the gymnasium floor, deprived of food and water, just as the Ossetians would do in the 2004 siege, and several male hostages were hauled outside and executed.[25] Beslan, like the major Army airbase in nearby Mozdok, was also site of an airfield used by the Russian military aviation for its combat operation in the nearby republic of Chechnya since 1994.[26]

On 2 September 2004, negotiations between Roshal and the hostage-takers proved unsuccessful, and they refused to allow food, water, and medicine to be taken in for the hostages, or for the bodies of the dead to be removed from the front of the school.[37] At noon, FSB First Deputy Director, Colonel General Vladimir Pronichev showed Dzasokhov a decree signed by the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Fradkov appointing North Ossetian FSB chief Major General Valery Andreyev as head of the operational headquarters.[54] In April 2005, however, a Moscow News journalist received photocopies of the interview protocols of Dzasokhov and Andreyev by investigators that revealed that two headquarters had been formed in Beslan: a formal one, upon which was laid all responsibility, and a secret one ( heavies ), which made the real decisions, and at which Andreyev had never been in charge.[55]

Early on the third day, Ruslan Aushev, Alexander Dzasokhov, North Ossetia's Parliament Chairman Taymuraz Mansurov, and First Deputy Chairman Izrail Totoonti together made contact with President of Ichkeria Aslan Maskhadov, a Chechen separatist leader fighting a guerrilla war in Chechnya.[49] Totoonti said that both Maskhadov and his Western-based emissary Akhmed Zakayev declared they were ready to fly to Beslan to negotiate with the militants, which was later confirmed by Zakayev.[67] Totoonti said that Maskhadov's sole demand was his unhindered passage to the school; however, the assault began one hour after the agreement on his arrival was made.[68][69] He also mentioned that journalists from Al Jazeera television offered for three days to participate in the negotiations and enter the school even as hostages, but their services were not needed by anyone. [70]