Guerrillas planned Russia attack, hid weapons in school basement: FSB

MOSCOW, Sept 4 — Guerrillas who took 1,000 hostages in a Russian school close to Chechnya for three days staged a well planned attack after first scouring the area and then disguising themselves as workers rebuilding a gym, officials said Saturday.
Russian newspapers and some politicians have questioned how a dozen guerrillas could take so many hostages and then stand up to hundreds of Russian troops during a grisly raid that lasted for more than six hours and killed more that 300 people.
The volatile Caucasus region is notorious for its tight road security caused by a decade of warfare in separatist Chechnya and flaring conflicts in other nearby multi-ethnic republics.But the media is filled with reports of the road police letting just about anyone pass through for a bribe.
The head of the North Ossetian security service said that he was certain now that the guerrillas had located their point of attack well in advance and did not simply rush in on the school on the first day of class on the spur of the moment.
"We found a large amount of explosives and mines, and their number says that this attack was planned in advance," Valery Andreyev was quoted as saying by Interfax.
"The armaments were hidden on the school grounds," he said.
He gave no other details but other news reports fleshed out the story.
They quoted an unnamed source as saying that the militia first scouted out two other schools before settling on School Number One — the main one in Beslan — because it was undergoing major reconstruction work over the summer.
The school needed everything — including a new floor for its gym.
"It looks like they settled on a school that needed renovation ... and which needed a new floor set for its gym," ITAR-TASS quoted an official as saying.
The gym saw the guerrillas herd their victims onto its floor on September 1 and leave them there without food or water and suffocating in overwhelming humidity and heat, surrounded by home-made explosives.
An official told news agencies that they settled on the building in July.
They posed as workers and snuck in their bombs, mines, rocket launchers and other weapons disguised as construction material.
"The bandits snuck in a large amount of arms, munitions, missiles and explosives hidden by planks, cement and other construction material. This was enough for them to lead an extended defense of the building," the source said
They then stashed them away in a case of the basement under the new gym floor before it was laid down, Russian news reports quoted security officials as saying.
Some 322 people — including 155 children — were reported killed, according to the latest toll.
The toll marks the highest in any single hostage-taking in the history of Russia, which has gone through a decade of warfare in separatist Chechnya.