Published: September 2, 2004

ESLAN, Russia, Thursday, Sept. 2 - Heavily armed insurgents, some with explosives strapped to their bodies, seized a school here in southern Russia on Wednesday, he rded scores of schoolchildren, parents and teachers into its gymnasium and threatened to kill them.

Russian soldiers rescued an unidentified child on Wednesday from a school that was seized by heavily armed insurgents in North Ossetia.

Ossetian women waited yesterday for news about the hostages - an estimated 120 to 300 children, parents and teachers - seized in a school in Beslan. Below, some of the troops who surrounded the school.

Russian soldiers rescued an unidentified child yesterday from a school that was seized by heavily armed insurgents in North Ossetia.

Several people died in the initial rebel raid on the school in Beslan

More than a dozen guerillas, including men and women, stormed Middle School No. 1 in this town in North Ossetia, not far from Chechnya on Russia's southern border with Georgia, as children lined up outside the building just moments after the opening of the school year. Estimates of the number of hostages ranged from 120 to more than 300.

Gunfire erupted during the seizure and afterward before quieting by Wednesday evening. Four to seven people are believed to have been killed in the initial raid, Lev Dzugayev, a spokesman for North Ossetia's president, said here. Two police officers guarding the school are missing. At least a dozen others were reported wounded, some gravely.

The local police, as well as special forces and soldiers from Russia's 58th Army, surrounded the school, creating a nervous standoff that continued into Thursday in stormy weather that flooded the streets.

Officials at the scene would not discuss who they thought the insurgents were, but a man who answered the phone at the school shortly after the siege began and identified himself as a spokesman for the attackers said they were Chechens.

The number of hostages remained unclear, reflecting a scene of confusion and anxiety as hundreds of relatives gathered outside in fearful vigil, sometimes having to be restrained from trying to approach the school. Rosa Tsurayeva rushed to the school when she heard gunfire, but by the time she arrived, her son, Zaur, 14, and daughter, Alina, 10, were among the hostages.

"I have to get there," she said she had told the officers who stopped her. "My children are there." She broke into sobs, rocking in a chair at a social center that has turned into a shelter for waiting relatives. "They would not let me."

The man who identified himself on the phone as the guerrillas' spokesman said they wanted talks with the leaders of North Ossetia and neighboring Ingushetia, as well as with a pediatrician who took part in negotiations with insurgents who seized a Moscow theater in October 2002.

"Wipe your sniffles," the man said, speaking crudely in accented Russian, when asked what they hoped to discuss with the officials. He then hung up.

The siege began the morning after a suicide bomber set off an explosion outside a subway station in Moscow, killing herself and at least 10 others in the latest convulsion of terrorist violence that has struck fear into Russians. Because of the nature of the explosives used, officials said on Wednesday, that attack appeared linked to the bombings of two passenger airliners, which crashed simultaneously on Aug. 24, killing 90.

Russia's defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, speaking in Moscow as the hostage crisis unfolded in the south, said the attacks amounted to war.

"War has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen, and there is no front," Mr. Ivanov said. "This is regrettably not the first, and I fear not the last, terrorist act."

President Vladimir V. Putin, for the second time in eight days, disrupted his working vacation in the Black Sea resort of Sochi and returned to Moscow. He did not immediately discuss the hostage crisis, but in an interview with Turkish journalists on the eve of a state visit to Turkey, Mr. Putin said Russia would never negotiate with terrorists or Chechen separatists, who have now been fighting Russian forces, with only a brief halt, since 1994.

"We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them," Mr. Putin said in remarks reported by Interfax.

But officials began talks with the guerrillas at the school in North Ossetia on Wednesday in hopes of ending the siege peacefully.

With the building in their control and evidently wired with mines and explosives, the guerrillas sent two notes, one with a hostage, and a videocassette, the officials said. The videocassette was blank, the officials said. One of the notes included a mobile telephone number, the other the simple message, "Wait," a spokesman here, Oleg Sogalov, said in a telephone interview.

The man who answered the school's phone said he represented the Second Group of Salakhin Riadus Shakhidi, a rebel contingent believed to be headed by Chechnya's most notorious insurgent commander, Shamil Basayev. Russian officials maintained that it was premature to say who had seized the school.

Mr. Basayev has previously been involved in or claimed responsibility for some of the worst attacks in Russia stemming from the long conflict in Chechnya. They include a raid in 1995 into Budennovsk, a town near Chechnya in the Stavropol region, during the first Chechen war. In that attack, his fighters killed 147 people and then held more than 1,000 people hostage in a hospital.

That raid ended when the captors loaded hundreds of hostages on buses and drove to Chechnya. Mr. Basayev also claimed responsibility for rebel attacks in Ingushetia in June that left nearly 100 dead.

Officials said negotiators had established contact with the guerrillas in the school. The director of the local branch of the Federal Security Service, Valery Andreyev, said in televised remarks that the guerrillas had refused to allow food and water to be sent in for the hostages.

Mr. Putin's adviser on Chechen affairs, Alsanbek Aslakhanov, told Interfax that the guerrillas had demanded a withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya and the release of insurgents jailed after the raids in Ingushetia in June.

The guerrillas threatened to destroy the school if any attempt was made to free the hostages and vowed to kill 50 schoolchildren for each guerrilla killed, North Ossetia's interior minister, Kazbek Dzantiyev, said, according to Russian news agencies. Middle School No. 1 has more than 800 students, ages 6 to 16, and some 60 teachers. Several officials said there appeared to be 15 to 20 guerrillas, at least two of them women. Wearing camouflage and masks and heavily armed with grenades and explosives, they apparently stormed the school using a hijacked police car and a truck, the officials said.

The raid occurred only moments after an opening-day ceremony attended by students, their parents and teachers. The first day of school here, known as Day of Knowledge, is one of the most festive days for Russian families, with children and parents dressing up and carrying flowers to greet teachers.

A few students managed to escape, apparently after hiding in a boiler room.The state television network, Rossiya, showed a camouflaged soldier racing a young girl to safety, followed by an elderly woman.

"I was standing near the gates," one student, Zarubek Tsumartov, said on Rossiya. "Music was playing. When I saw three people running with guns, I thought it was a joke at first. Then they fired in the air. And we ran away."

The siege in Beslan had portentous echoes of one of the most notorious terrorist acts in recent Russian history: the hostage crisis at a Moscow theater in October 2002. A band of insurgents seized the theater during a musical, "Nord-Ost," and held more than 700 hostages for 57 hours before commandoes stormed the building. At least 41 rebels died in the raid, but so did at least 129 hostages, most from the effects of a nerve gas pumped into the theater.

Russia's second war in Chechnya began in 1999 and shows few signs of ending, even though Russian soldiers and security officers control most of the mountainous republic.

The raid in Ingushetia in June, and a similar one in Chechnya's capital, Grozny, on Aug. 21 that killed as many as 50, demonstrated the rebels' capacity to stage larger operations, if intermittently. The school siege - as well as the attacks against two airliners last week and outside a Moscow subway station on Tuesday night - bracketed the presidential election in Chechnya held last Sunday to replace Akhmad Kadyrov, a former rebel turned Kremlin supporters who was assassinated in Grozny in May.

Chechnya's separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, who served as president during the de facto independence from 1996 to 1999 before fleeing Grozny in the second war, denied involvement in the terrorist attacks and in Wednesday's siege. Across North Ossetia, schools closed, as did the region's airport. The authorities announced they had closed the region's heavily guarded borders with Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Stavropol, and with Georgia.

Russia's military campaign in Chechnya, now in its sixth year, has faced international criticism because its forces have been accused of unwarranted killings and other abuses in their pursuit of separatist rebels. But in the aftermath of the last week's attacks, political leaders from the United States and European and other countries expressed common cause with Russia.

President Bush called Mr. Putin and offered support. The United Nations Security Council also scheduled an emergency meeting.

C.J. Chivers reported from Beslan for this article, and Steven Lee Myers from Moscow. Nikolai Khalip contributed reporting from Moscow.

Editor: Frankspeak