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23 September 2004
There’s no escaping evil in this world of horrors
By: Finbarr Slattery
THE staple diet in the media, week in week out, has been the brutal attacks by terrorists all over the world. The worst of all was the terrorist attack in the school at Beslan which was the main item dealt with in my column last week. I am happy to report that the little girl I told you about last week, who was blown out the window after an explosion but, in her confusion, opted to climb back to an inferno, has survived to tell the tale.
As nothing could surpass the horrendous siege at Beslan, I give you some more details on the happenings in that school gym in which 1,200 people were held hostage.
The Observer reports while the screaming children were rounded up, a teacher rushed up to a gunman to remonstrate. He appeared to be listening to her pleas. “Have you finished?” he asked. As she nodded, he shot her dead.
From that point, the terrorists went about their business with ruthless efficiency. The hostages were told to hand over their phones. Many of the men were taken away and executed.
The rest - 1,000 people, mostly women and children - were herded into a gym where the terrorists had stashed their explosives during the holidays. Within ten minutes, they had boobytrapped the room, mines were strung across the ceiling, and two large explosives hung from the basketball nets.
Squashed together like sardines in the sweltering heat, the captives could not move. As the temperature reached 25 C plus, the children stripped to their underwear. But their captors wouldn’t let them drink, smashing the taps in the bathroom, and a child who begged for water was bayoneted.
“We were drinking urine. It’s all we could do,” said Sasha Pogrebov, 13. These were young children, naked, dehydrated, hungry and scared, yet even the female terrorists - so called Black Widow suicide bombers - apparently showed them no mercy. Masked gunmen screamed abuse; terrified infants were threatened with gunfire. Husbands and fathers were killed; teenage girls were dragged away, and possibly raped.
On the second day, mothers of young children were presented with the cruellest of choices, to leave their babies, or stay behind with all their children.
Salimat Suleimanova was told she could go free if she took her two-month-old daughter, but that her son, Shamil, would have to stay. “They didn’t allow me to go back to say goodbye,” she wept.
By Friday morning, 10,000 Russian troops and Special Forces were massed outside the building. Their approach had been a softly, softly round of negotiations until a bomb was detonated, probably accidentally, in the gym, and a group of children seized the opportunity to make a frantic bolt for freedom.
As they fled blinking into the sunshine, the terrorists opened fire. A few of the children reached the arms of their waiting parents. More had to be carried away, wounded and bleeding.
Ten minutes later, the roof collapsed, crushing untold numbers. The mines in the gym were detonated, and armed civilians joined in a fierce gun battle while desperate parents broke through the security cordon to ransack the burning building for their missing children. Chaos reigned. By the end of the day, more than 330 people - half of them children - were dead.
Since that world-shattering terror attack in Beslan there has been others of course. There was a massive bomb explosion outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia killing at least nine and injuring 182. The motives behind these acts are impossible to comprehend.
Also, there was a sad tale from Thailand - a British backpacking couple shot after a row with a Thai policeman, and of course Baghdad remains the terrorist capital of the world. Last week there were over 300 killed in Iraq. There seems to be no escaping.
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