A tolling bell and 332 white balloons — one for each victim — will commemorate on Friday the second anniversary of the school hostage massacre in Beslan, where the mental and political scars of the tragedy remain raw.
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/ 2 September 2005
Malik has the nonchalant manner of any 14-year-old when he says ”I don’t know” or snaps at his little sister, Fatima. But his green eyes are ”those of a 40-year-old man”, his mother says, even a year after he survived the Beslan school hostage massacre. Sitting on a bench outside his family’s home, Malik Kolchakeyev already knows what questions are coming.
Some of the women sat at a wooden table littered with documents. Others hovered near a computer learning how to write a press release, or traded gossip over weak tea. It could almost be a PTA meeting or a ladies’ social circle — but for the tragedy that haunts this room. All of these women lost relatives in last September’s Beslan school massacre.
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/ 3 September 2004
Ambulance sirens screamed and naked, bleeding children wailed in the arms of soldiers amid earth-shattering grenade blasts as the three-day school hostage crisis in Beslan ended in a chaotic bloodbath. "They did not give us water," said one young boy. Another naked boy at a different spot later said: "We drank urine."
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/ 3 September 2004
All of the Russian school where hundreds had been held hostage since Wednesday is now under control of Russian special forces, following a series of explosions and heavy gunfire from both sides. According to AP, 250 people were wounded in the school — 180 of them children. At least 10 people, children and adults, were killed.
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/ 2 September 2004
Hundreds of relatives of the Russian school hostages were on Thursday gathered outside the school in the town of Beslan. The armed captors who stormed the school on Wednesday released 26 women and children on Thursday, but hundreds of others are still being held. And anger is mounting among the relatives.
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/ 2 September 2004
Heavily armed militants, many strapped with explosives, held more than 350 hostages including children through the night at a provincial Russian school as the crisis stretched toward its second day on Thursday. Crowds of distraught relatives and townspeople waited helplessly for news of their neighbours and loved ones, their distress sharpened by the sporadic rattle of gunfire from the cordoned-off crisis site.