Putin Vows To Tighten Security After Bloody Hostage Crisis

by Yana Dlugy
BESLAN, Russia, Sept 4 (AFP) - President Vladimir Putin vowed Saturday to toughen national security and defend Russian unity after a bloody hostage crisis killed at least 330 people, maintaining his uncompromising stance on the conflict in breakaway Chechnya.
In a televised address to the nation a day after a school hostage crisis in southern Russia ended in carnage, the president admitted Moscow had underestimated the complexity and danger of new strategic threats.
"We did not understand the complexity and the danger of the process which was emerging in our country and in the entire world," said Putin, who had earlier flown to the North Ossetian town of Beslan, where more than 1,000 children and adults were taken hostage Wednesday.
"We did not know how to react in the appropriate fashion. We have shown weakness in the face of danger and the weak get beaten up," he said in the 10-minute address shown on both state TV channels.
Putin, who despite tough talk and nearly five years of conflict in Chechnya has failed to rein in separatist rebels or stop a spate of attacks across Russia, faces the most serious challenge of his four and a half year presidency with the horrific end to the hostage-taking.
The president said he would take steps in the near future to fortify the country's security.
Besides the hostage crisis in Beslan some 100 people were killed in a 10-day period in the downing of two Russian passenger jets by suicide bombers and a suicide blast at a Moscow subway station which killed .
"We have not paid due attention to defense and security issues. We will, in the near future, take steps aimed at strengthening the unity of the country," a somber Putin said, before declaring Monday and Tuesday as two days of national mourning for the dead.
In a tough-talking speech, Putin described the fight against extremists as a struggle to preserve the territorial integrity of Russia itself.
"The terrorists think that they are stronger then us, that they can scare us with their cruelty, that they will be able to paralyse our will. And it would seem we are faced with a choice -- we either fight them off or agree with their demands."
Rescuers were still pulling charred bodies out of the booby-trapped remnants of what was once the gym of Beslan's main school Saturday after the bloody end to the siege by rebels demanding independence for neighboring Chechnya.
Putin had earlier visited some of the 700 injured in the assault on the school and said all of Russia shared Beslan's grief.
Anxious relatives were scouring lists of names, desperately searching for their loved ones still missing after Friday's chaos and bloodshed.
The drama ended in nightmarish scenes described by the press as the "worst possible scenario", with half-naked, bloodied children fleeing from the school and the mutilated bodies of the dead rushed out on stretchers.
Dozens of unexploded bombs remained in the building, hampering the work of rescuers trying to drag bodies from the rubble.
A crisis unit set up outside the school Saturday said the death toll had risen to 330 -- about half of them children.
Twenty-six hostage-takers had also been killed, an official said earlier.
Responding to the international anger and horror at the carnage, Putin has said the special forces who had been massed outside the school since the start of the crisis had not intended to storm the building. But events had "unfolded very rapidly and unexpectedly".
The assault was triggered by a series of unexplained explosions, during which the gym roof collapsed on the hostages below, killing and maiming scores of people.
One witness told AFP the gym had been rigged with explosives -- a theory backed by security officials who charged the rebels had planted dozens of weapons in the school while it was under renovation during summer holidays.
"They always told us to keep away from the wires because if we tripped on the wrong one, we'd be blown up," said 15-year-old Yana of her captors.
Security forces alleged the attack had been meticulously planned days before pupils returned to school Wednesday after the summer break.
"We found a large amount of explosives and mines and their number says that this attack was planned in advance," Interfax news agency quoted the top local security official for the southern Russian region, Valery Andreyev, as saying.
"The armaments were hidden on the school grounds."
Another official said the militants has posed as builders in July, and snuck in bombs, mines, rocket launchers along with other weapons disguised as construction material.
Survivors told of the terror inside the gym, where they were forced to drink their own urine to avoid dehydration and to strip down to their underwear to cope with the stifling heat.
But Friday's harrowing scenes were a grim reminder of a botched rescue attempt of hostages in a Moscow theater in October 2002 in which 132 people were killed -- most of them when security forces pumped a powerful gas into the building.
Officials have said nine people of Arab descent were among the hostage-takers. But an Islamist group calling itself the Islambouli Brigades, which claimed responsibility for other deadly attacks in Russia last month, denied any link to the events in Beslan.
Condolences poured in from the world over -- while the Russian daily Izvestia dispensed with a headline or story on Saturday. Instead it showed only a man with an anguished look rushing a semi-naked girl to safety in his arms, her small face frozen in horror.