The BBC reports:
A man said to have been a hostage-taker in the bloody school siege in the southern Russian town of Beslan has been shown on state television.
His hands bound, the frightened-looking man was shown being led by two hooded commandos into a room, where he was interviewed for a short time.—-Claims about the number and fate of the hostage-takers, who were demanding Chechen independence, have been vague and contradictory.
Hostage-taker? Just pause and think about this while you read this account:
Holding up the corpse of a man just shot dead in front of hundreds of hostages at a Russian school, the rebel — his pockets stuffed with ammunition and grenades — warned: “If a child utters even a sound, we’ll kill another one.”When children fainted from lack of sleep, food and water, their masked and camouflaged captors simply sneered. In the intolerable heat of the gym, adults implored children to drink their own urine.
And this one:
A shocking account of the siege has come from Indira Dzetskelova, the mother of 12-year-old Dzerase who was guarded by two women suicide bombers during the siege. She said: “On the first day they shot a man before my daughter’s eyes. They frightened the kids by saying that water in the tap was poisoned.“The famished children had to eat rose petals from bouquets which they specially bought for their teachers to mark the first day of term. Parents who were also captured had to feed their kids with all the window plants.“After they ate all the petals, my daughter said that she started to nibble the rose plants.“She told me that several 15-year-old girls were raped by terrorists. She heard their terrible cries and screams when those monsters took them away.”
Hostage-takers. And here I was thinking that the BBC had scraped the bottom of the barrel with their labelling of terrorists as militants.
