Beslan School Hostage Crisis - Background

Background

Comintern Street SNO was one of seven schools in Beslan, a town of around 35,000 people in the republic of North Ossetia–Alania, in Russia's Caucasus. The school, located next to the district police station, had around 60 teachers and more than 800 students. Its gymnasium, where most of the hostages were held for 52 hours, was a recent addition, measuring 10 metres wide and 25 metres long. There were reports that 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. There were also claims that a "sniper's nest" on the sports hall roof had been set up in advance.

It was also reported that the SNO in Beslan was used by Ossetian nationalist 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. According to media reports, SNO was one of several buildings in which the Ossetian hostage-takers had held hundreds of Ingush hostages, many of them women and children; the hostages been kept in the same gymnasium, deprived of food and water, at least one newborn and several dozen male hostages were executed Beslan was also site of an airfield used by the Russian Air Force for combat operations in Chechnya since 1994.