This fits well with the botched Nord-ost rescue; of course, this doesn't lift any blame off the chechen jihadis, who are ultimately responsible for this barbaric tragedy. But, again, Russia is not our friend, and is not a western country (yet, the rightwingers here who wish a close pan-european alliance with Motherland do so in rejection of the "euro-atlantists", IE the US Hegemon and its perceived vassal, the EU... because Russia supposedly has more in common with us than us with the USA).
By David Satter
On September 1, 2004, the children of School Number One in Beslan, a town of 30,000 in the Russian republic of North Ossetia, gathered to go in for the first day of school. Suddenly, the air was filled with machine gun fire. A military truck pulled up and two dozen men with Kalashnikov assault rifles jumped out. Other terrorists appeared out of nowhere. The terrorists herded 1,200 students and parents into the school gymnasium, where they were held for 52 hours before a pitched battle broke out between the terrorists and Russian forces. The fighting led to the deaths of 332 people, including 186 children. It was the worst terrorist act since September 11, 2001.
While it was going on, the Beslan standoff riveted the attention of the world. Once it was over, however, the incident was largely forgotten. The day after the storming of the school, on September 4, bulldozers gathered the debris of the building, including children's notebooks and the body parts of the victims, and removed it to a garbage dump on the outskirts of town.
The survivors, however, wanted justice, and they were plunged into emotional turmoil as they listened to the version of events propagated by the Russian authorities, who put the blame entirely on the terrorists, exonerated officials of any wrongdoing (many of them were later promoted), and refused to listen to the survivors' accounts of what they had seen and experienced.