RUSSIA - Sep 1 - Armed Gang Seizes School Children As Hostages.

At least 120 children and parents are taken hostage in a school in the country's ethnic republic of North Ossetia by armed men who threaten to explode the building if it is stormed. Officials said that the hostage-takers had demanded talks with top politicians in efforts to seek the release of suspected Chechen rebels arrested after raids last June in Ingushetia, which neighbours the conflict-torn republic of Chechnya. Varied reports suggested that up to 400 hostages may have been seized and held in a school sports hall in the town of Beslan by about 40 armed militants, possibly including women and armed with explosives, who had crossed into the republic from Chechnya. At least three people were killed during clashes, and 50 children managed to escape during the morning. There have been fresh signs of destabilisation of the Caucasus, including recent tensions in the ethnic republics of Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria and the stand-off over the border with the Georgian authorities and its breakaway pro-Russian republic of South Ossetia. The former Chechen President and rebel leader Aslan Mashkadov, threatened this summer an intensification of attacks against Russian forces, although he has claimed that he does not target civilians. The recent attacks point to growing use of 'black widows' or female Chechen suicide bombers, in a tactic mirroring the Middle East and pushing some analysts to suggest a tightening link with radical international terror organisations. The latest attack mirrored the siege of the Moscow Dubrovka theatre in October 2002, when hundreds of Russians attending the Nord-Ost musical were taken hostage by 40 men and women. Some 129 people in the audience were killed after special forces raided the theatre. It also raised memories of the siege by Chechen rebels at a hospital in Budyannovsk in southern Russia in 1995, in which 129 of the 1,500 hostages were killed.