About 1,000 people, mostly parents, were massed the three-story building in the town of Beslan, demanding information and accusing the government of failing to protect their children. Russian special forces wearing camouflage and carrying heavy-caliber machine guns surrounded Middle School No. Hours into the desperate standoff, security officials said they had made brief contact with the hostage-takers. The attackers claim the building is booby-trapped and put small children at windows to discourage Russian security forces from considering a shootout. The gunmen stormed in during a school-wide assembly and the deaths occurred in the chaos that followed. It was the first day of classes at the school, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth.
More than a dozen militants wearing suicide-bomb belts seized a southern Russian school in a region bordering Chechnya on Wednesday, taking hostage about 400 people - half of them children - and threatening to blow up the building if police storm it.
