If wages of sin are death, Beslan killers deserve (the) worse. Between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. on September 1, 2004, two military-style vehicles pulled up to Middle School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia, a province in southern Russia. A group of 32 masked men and women climbed out of the vehicles and rushed into the school. Heavily armed with pistols, machine guns and explosives, the terrorists quickly gained complete control of the school and its occupants.
The rest is history. Out of approximately ‘1,200 people’ taken hostage by the terrorists, over 350 died, including over 195 children, and 700 were injured in the war-zone which the school was transformed into. Due to the sheer force of the explosions, many of them are still unaccounted for. Kremlin may be trying hard to nail the Chechen separatists Black Winwods said to be the real culprits - though captured Chechen terrorist Nur-pashi Kulayev could not provide sufficient clues -, the pandemonium during the 3-day school siege was a sad commentary on the Kremlin’s law and order.
The starvation, trauma, suffocation, torture and heat that those teachers, parents and naked, bleeding kids were subjected to defy description. One can only sigh with grief!
- Sajjan Singh Thakur
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