10 hostage-takers in Russian school siege identified: official

Ten of the militants who seized over 1,200 hostages in a southern Russian school last week have been identified, Itar-Tass news agency reported Thursday.

Officials investigating the hostage-taking crisis said six of them came from Russia's Chechnya republic, where rebel forces have been fighting federal troops for five years.

The other four came from the neighboring Ingushetia republic, which suffered the death of over 90 people in coordinated rebel attacks against law enforcement facilities in June.

Russian experts made the conclusion after examining bodies of 30 hostage-takers and fragments of one more corpse.

Investigators are interrogating the only surviving gunman Nur-Pashi Kulayev, a resident of Chechnya.

More than 30 armed militants seized a secondary school in the town of Beslan in Russia's North Ossetia republic. The crisis ended on the third day as Russian troops rescued hundreds of hostages in an unplanned rescue raid on the building, but at least 335 hostages, half of them children, were killed in the tragedy.

Russia's Federal Security Services on Wednesday offered a reward of up to 300 million rubles (over 10 million US dollars) for information that will help it hunt down Chechen rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov who Russia suspects of being behind the school siege.

Source: Xinhua