by Yury Tutov
BESLAN, Russia, Sept 1 (AFP) - Gunmen with explosives strapped around their waists took well over 100 people hostage at a school in southern Russia near war-torn Chechnya Wednesday and threatened to blow up the building if security forces moved in.
In Russia`s fourth terror attack within a week, at least 17 masked and heavily armed people burst into the courtyard of the school in the town of Beslan where students were lining up for their first day in school at 10:00 am (0600 GMT).
"Three people ran into the courtyard," one boy told NTV television. "At first I thought it was a joke. Then they began to shoot and we started running."
The hostage-takers, who reportedly included women, herded the children and adults into a gym and reportedly demanded to meet with the head of the local region of North Ossetia and neighboring Ingushetia, ITAR-TASS reported.
The group also demanded to see Leonid Roshal, a doctor who conducted negotiations with hostage-takers at a Moscow theater in October 2002.
Roshal had arrived in the area by late Wednesday, after the authorities had managed to begin talks with the hostage takers.
The group "has for the first time made contact via a mobile phone that was given to them earlier, and asked for food and water," said Lev Dzugaev, a top official with the local government.
Nine adults, including one hostage-taker, were killed and four injured as a result of the attack, where children aged between six to 17 were seized, news agencies reported, quoting law enforcement officials.
There were conflicting reports throughout the day on how many people were being held inside, with figures fluctuating from 120 to 400. A crisis unit set up to deal with the siege told ITAR-TASS that 132 children were among the hostages.
North Ossetia`s interior minister, Kazbek Dzantiev, said: "The number of hostages is probably somewhere between 300 and 400."
Dzantiev said the hostage-takers had threatened to kill 50 children for every abductor killed, news reports said.
"For every destroyed rebel, they will kill 50 children, and 20 children for every injured rebel," he was quoted as saying by news agencies and television.
Authorities had cordoned off the area around the school, where several tanks and armored personnel carriers and dozens of troops and police had taken up positions.
A crowd of angry parents gathered outside the cordoned off area, many of them armed and angry that authorities were not doing enough to free their children.
"Take more pictures and send them to Putin with greetings from North Ossetia," one man sarcastically said to photographers taking pictures.
President Vladimir Putin rushed back to Moscow from the Black Sea to deal with the crisis, which came just hours after a suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway left nine dead and scores injured.
Last week two Russian planes were blown up killing 90 people in an attack blamed by Russian authorities on female Chechen suicide bombers.
Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, through his spokesman in London, denied that his forces were behind the attack.
The hostage-taking shattered the festive atmosphere that surrounds the first day back at school in Russia and revived painful memories of a Moscow theatre hostage-taking in 2002 by Chechen commandoes, during which 130 people died after police used a poison gas when they stormed the building.
Some children had managed to escape the school at the beginning of the siege, with wildly contradictory figures of between 15 and 50.
All entrances to North Ossetia from neighboring republics have been closed, the republic`s prime minister told Interfax. "We have increased security measures in all towns," including all schools and kindergartens, he said.
Roads into North Ossetia from Georgia were also closed, a spokesman at the regional office of the FSB (ex-KGB) security services said.
North Ossetia lies just west of the strife-torn Russian republic of Chechnya, where Moscow has been locked in a bloody conflict with separatists for the past decade.
In 1995, in the midst of the first Russo-Chechen war, some 200 Chechen rebels stormed a hospital in Stavropolsky region, seized up to a 1,000 people hostage. The standoff lasted for several days and ended with Russian forces storming the hospital, leaving more than 100 people dead on all sides.