http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...school_seizure

(Link does not appear to be working anymore)

BELSAN, Russia - More than a dozen militants wearing suicide-bomb belts seized a southern Russian school in a region bordering Chechnya (news - web sites) on Wednesday, taking hostage about 400 people — half of them children — and threatening to blow up the building if police storm it. As many as eight people have been reported killed, one of them a school parent.


Hours into the desperate standoff, security officials said they had made brief contact with the hostage-takers. Russian special forces wearing camouflage and carrying heavy-caliber machine guns surrounded Middle School No. 1. About 1,000 people, mostly parents, were massed the three-story building in the town of Belsen, demanding information and accusing the government of failing to protect their children.


Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the North Ossetia region's Interior Ministry, said that the hostages have threatened "for every destroyed fighter, they will kill 50 children and for every injured fighter — 20 (children)," the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

(more at link)

Oh yeah. This is the way to gain sympathy for your cause.