VLADIKAVKAZ - Four men have been arrested and accused of planning a back-up attack in case last year's bloody hostage-taking in Beslan should have failed to take place, Russian officials said Wednesday.
"In April, four people, all Chechens, were arrested. They were preparing a copy of the Beslan attack for a school in the village of Nesterovskaya," deputy prosecutor general Nikolai Shepel told journalists in Vladikavkaz, capital of Russia's North Ossetia republic in the North Caucasus.
Nesterovskaya is in the neighbouring Russian republic of Ingushetia, home to the Ingush, a small ethnic group closely linked to the Chechens.
Shepel said the alleged head of the group, Aslambek Khatuyev, who has not been caught, had been telephoned by the hostage-takers in Beslan on September 1 and told that the attack -- which eventually resulted in the deaths of 330 hostages -- had been successful.
Khatuyev then allegedly phoned to say that his own plans were "cancelled," because the attack in Beslan, a small town in North Ossetia, had "gone well."
In the attack on Beslan, 32 militants seized a school packed with children and parents on the opening day of term, September 1.
The attackers, who included Chechens and Ingush, demanded a withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed during two wars over the last decade.
In a ferocious battle between the hostage-takers and Russian rescue forces, 330 hostages died along with all the militants, except one, whose trial started in Vladikavkaz on Tuesday. Of the victims, 186 were children.
05/18/2005 14:02 GMT