More than 500 remain hospitalized following a school hostage situation in the southern Russian province of Ossetia. The Command Post has a kajillion entries with details. 27 hostage takers got killed; some escaped, of which three were subsequently arrested and one was reportedly recognized by locals and lynched. Ten of the hostage takers were reportedly not Chechnyans but Arabs with known al-Qaeda connections.
Many of the hospitalizations were apparently for dehydration -- the children had been kept for three days in the blazing Central Asian summer heat without liquids.
I have a feeling the arrested terrorists are going to experience some interrogation techniques that will make the most feverish horror stories about Guantanamo sound like descriptions of a holiday resort in comparison. And I shall be playing the latest product of my company: a nanotech violin.
UPDATE: body count keeps mounting; Ze'ev Schiff finds a deadly common denominator.
UPDATE 2: Allison pays tribute to an unsung hero.
UPDATE 3: Winds of Change has lots of useful background on Chechnya. I wasn't aware, for instance, that most Chechens belong to the mystical and fairly liberal Sufi branch of Islam: the fundamentalism is an import from, guess where...
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