Attackers seize school in Russia

MIKHAIL METZEL / AP An unidentified young woman is consoled after an explosion outside Moscow's Rizhskaya subway station. At least 10 people were killed and 51 injured in the second apparent terrorist attack in Russia in a week.

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The seizure took place on the first day of the Russian school year, when it was likely that a large number of parents had accompanied their children to class. Reports said the raid took place just after a ceremony marking the school year's start.

Sergei Vlasov, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry in Moscow, confirmed the seizure, but did not immediately have further details.

The ITAR-Tass news agency, citing regional emergency officials, said about 400 people including some 200 children were being held captive.

The Interfax news agency, citing Ismel Shaov, a regional spokesman for the Federal Security Service, said there were 17 attackers, both make and female, and that some were wearing suicide-bomb belts.

The in the city of Beslan, about 10 miles north of Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, a republic that borders warring Chechnya.

There were no immediate reports of whether the assailants were making demands or indications of who they were.

The school seizure comes one day after a female suicide bomber set off a powerful homemade explosive device outside a Moscow subway station, killing at least 10 people and injuring 51, authorities said.

The bombing occurred a week after explosives downed two Russian passenger jets almost simultaneously, killing 90 people in one of the deadliest attacks on civilian targets in Russia in years. Russian authorities have been investigating two female passengers with Chechen names who boarded the two planes on last-minute tickets and may have detonated hexogen explosives.

An Islamic extremist group with apparent ties to al-Qaida that claimed responsibility for the plane crashes said it carried out yesterday's bombing as well.

"We in the Islambouli Brigades announce our responsibility for this operation ... which comes in support of Muslims of Chechnya," it said in a statement, according to news-agency reports from the Middle East. Even before the subway-station bombing, Russian media reported that two other Chechen women accompanied the apparent plane bombers to Moscow in the days before the twin crashes and were still at large in the capital.
 
Anticipating further attacks, authorities had stepped up security around the city, and initial reports last night suggested the suicide bomber turned away from the subway station after seeing police officers checking documents at the entrance.

"She got scared of them, turned around and decided to blow herself up among the people," Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov told reporters after rushing to the scene. "There were many people there. The explosion was very powerful."

Some Chechen female suicide bombers are believed to be so-called "black widows," who have lost husbands or male relatives in the fighting that has gripped the southern region of Chechnya over most of the past decade.

The explosion transformed a mild late-summer evening in northern Moscow into a bloody scene of screaming bystanders, burning cars and rescue squads. Some bodies were found dozens of yards from the explosion.

The Moscow subway system was bustling yesterday with returning vacationers on the last day of summer vacation. The Rizhskaya metro station is situated just off Prospekt Mira, or Boulevard of Peace, one of the city's major thoroughfares.

The bomb contained about two pounds of TNT along with iron bolts and other metal fragments intended to kill victims, officials said. The explosion at about 8:15 p.m. set two cars on fire and pelted passers-by with slicing metal shards. The blazing automobiles sent plumes of dark smoke into the air. At first, witnesses thought a car bomb had exploded.

Information from The Washington Post, The Associated Press and Reuters is included in this report.