More than 330 people—nearly half of them children—died in September 2004 during the siege of a school in the town of Beslan in Russia's North Ossetian Republic. The siege was widely blamed on separatist Chechen rebels, and there was much public criticism that the death toll was unnecessarily high because Russian special forces troops had bungled the rescue. The attack in Beslan followed the midair destruction of two Russian civilian airliners in August that was blamed on Chechen women suicide-bombers. Akhmad Kadyrov, Chechnya's pro-Russian president, was killed in a massive bomb blast in Grozny in May 2004.
Source
Encyclopedia Britannica
A volunteer carries a small child after special forces stormed a school house in Beslan
See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_hostage_crisis
