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BESLAN, Russia (CNN) -- Special forces have stormed a school in southern Russia after dozens of hostages escaped amid explosions and intense gunfire.
Russian commandos were in control of the school Friday, Russian news agencies said. Russian television NTV said five of the hostage-takers had been killed.
A local official said "most" of the hostages were alive. Interfax reported that 158 children had been hospitalized.
"Those children who remained in the school, in general, did not suffer. The ones who suffered were the children in the group which ran from the school and on whom the fighters opened fire," Interfax quoted an official as saying, Reuters reported.
Unconfirmed reports said some of the hostage-takers had escaped during the chaos and were trying to flee the city.
Several loud explosions and small-arms fire were heard for more than an hour near the school, where armed hostage-takers had been holding hundreds of children, parents and teachers.
The ITAR-Tass news agency said soldiers blew a hole in the building to help with the raid. Interfax quoted authorities as saying the school roof had collapsed.
Children, some of them naked and others in their underwear, escaped and were crowded into a makeshift area surrounded by Russian military vehicles outside the school.
Many were receiving medical treatment as well as food and water.
CNN's Ryan Chilcote reported seeing numerous wounded people being evacuated from the area.
The explosions and gunfire came on the third day of the hostage crisis, as relatives and journalists were being told by authorities to move further back from the school.
Chilcote said that according to Russian news agencies, the gunfire erupted when some of the hostage-takers tried to break out of the school as Russian troops approached to collect the bodies of those killed in Wednesday's initial attack.
Two bombs went off in the vicinity of the school, and children tried to escape. The hostage-takers then turned their gunfire on the children, the agencies reported.
It was unclear how many hostages were still in the school.
Earlier, Russian officials said it was possible that hundreds more people had been taken hostage than first thought.
A spokesman for the regional government told CNN an earlier estimate of 350 hostages was low.
Two of 26 hostages freed by their captors on Thursday indicated there were 1,000 children, parents and teachers inside the building in Beslan, near the troubled Russian republic of Chechnya.
Relatives waiting outside the school also have said there could have been as many as 1,000 hostages, noting that the school has 11 grades with 75-100 students in each grade.
Asked about the discrepancy with the earlier estimate, the regional government spokesman said officials originally accounted only for those children whose parents reported them missing.
But teachers also were in the school when armed attackers seized the building Wednesday morning.
And many of the children -- especially in the lower grades -- were accompanied by their parents and in some cases entire families for a celebration to mark the start of the school year.
Before Friday's developments, Chilcote said the situation in the school was "very, very dire."
"Two of the 26 women and children released yesterday are saying the situation is very bad inside the school's gymnasium where the hostages are being kept.
"At one point the men were separated from the women and children. The men were then brought back into the gymnasium, but there weren't as many of them, and there's no word what happened to the other men."
"There is no food and water. At one point the hostage-takers brought them one cup of water for, as they put it, 1,000 hostages."
The attackers had threatened to kill the children if an assault was launched.
"Our most important task in the current situation is, of course, to save the lives and health of those who were taken hostage," Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.
The former president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, had been leading the talks with the hostage-takers. Aushev entered the school and met face-to-face with the captors. Ingushetia is a Russian republic bordering Chechnya.
Tense negotiations saw 26 women and children -- some of them infants -- released from the school Thursday. Security forces in military fatigues carried the children to safety.
Officials had said there were between 15 and 20 armed assailants, including at least two women. Some were reported to be wearing explosives-packed belts.
Theater siege
The crisis was reminiscent of the October 2002 siege of a Moscow theater, when Chechen rebels threatened to kill some 700 hostages and demanded an end to the war in Chechnya.
Many of those attackers were women, with explosives belts strapped to their body, while the men were armed with pistols and rifles. Two massive bombs also had been placed in the theater.
That standoff ended when Russian forces piped poison gas into the theater to knock out everyone inside, but more than 120 hostages and 41 attackers were killed, most of them from the gas.
The current crisis follows a bloody week in Russia. A female suicide bomber killed nine people outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday, and two suspected Chechen female suicide bombers downed two airliners on August 24, killing all 89 people aboard the planes.
Russian officials have said the new wave of attacks is an attempt at revenge for last weekend's elections in Chechnya in which a Kremlin-backed candidate won the presidency.
Beslan is 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of Vladikavkaz in southern Russia, which borders Chechnya. |
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