Today, Russia marks 20 years since Islamist commandos took hostages at a school in Beslan, in the Russian Caucasus, which ended in a massacre that killed 334 people, including 186 children.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was already in power at the time of the attack, visited the school for the first time on August 20, where he compared the massacre to the ongoing Ukrainian military offensive in the Kursk region.
On September 2004, XNUMX, on the first day of the school year, an armed group consisting of Chechens and Ingush entered a school in Beslan, in the Russian republic of North Ossetia, and took more than a thousand people hostage: parents, teachers and students.
They were kept without water for more than 50 hours, and several of them were executed. A double explosion in the school's gymnasium on September 3 caused panic, and children tried to escape under fire from the kidnappers.
These explosions, the origin of which has not been fully determined, prompted Russian special forces to launch a chaotic attack that ended in bloodshed.
During today's commemoration, former students who survived the massacre walked through the school yard, carrying portraits of the victims and white roses.
Relatives of the victims, survivors and officials, including regional governor Sergej Menjail, laid flowers and knelt before the cross in the school's burned-out former gymnasium, which has since become a memorial.
The Beslan Mothers' Committee, an association of parents of victims who tirelessly call for an objective investigation of the tragedy, held a press conference.
The mothers met with Putin during his visit and asked questions "regarding the actions of federal and regional law enforcement officials" but received no answers, Tatiana Chernikova said.
This attack, the deadliest in Russian history, took place during the second Chechen war in which the Russian army and Islamic separatists clashed.
In the end, Moscow won the conflict, accused of killing tens of thousands of civilians.
The attack in Beslan marked the peak of the crimes committed during the two Chechen wars (1994-1996, then 1999-2009).
The poor management of this crisis and the practical absence of negotiations led to protests led by the Beslan Mothers' Committee, which in 2005 received the resignation of the then president of this republic, Aleksandar Dzasohov.
In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that Russian authorities had taken insufficient preventive measures and criticized the disproportionate use of force during the attack on the school.
During his recent visit to a school in Beslan, Vladimir Putin drew a parallel between this attack and the unprecedented Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk region, carried out more than two years after a major attack on the Kremlin in Ukraine.
"Just as we fought against terrorists, today we must fight against those who commit crimes in the Kursk region, in the Donbas," he said, continuing his argument about the "denazification" of Ukraine.
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