Beslan school attack, violent takeover of a school in Beslan, a city in the North Caucasus republic of North Ossetia, Russia, in September 2004. Perpetrated by militants linked to the separatist insurgency in the nearby republic of Chechnya, the attack resulted in the deaths of more than 330 people, the majority of them children. The scale of the violence at Beslan and, in particular, the fact that the attackers deliberately targeted young children traumatized the Russian public and horrified the outside world. The failure of law enforcement agencies to prevent the deaths shook Russians’ confidence in the government, and Pres. Vladimir Putin subsequently centralized control over the country’s far-flung regions.

The siege began on the morning of September 1, 2004, when at least 32 armed individuals stormed the school and took more than 1,000 hostages, including pupils in both primary and secondary grades and their teachers, as well as parents and relatives who had gathered to celebrate the opening day of the new school year. Some people died in the initial attack, but most were herded into a gymnasium, which the attackers rigged with explosives. The hostages were refused water or food; after two days passed, some of them resorted to drinking urine. The siege ended on the morning of September 3, when explosions inside the school prompted Russian special forces to enter the building. Many hostages were killed by explosions or in a subsequent fire in the gym. (The exact causes of these incidents were debated.) Others were slain by the attackers or perished in the ensuing chaos of shelling and gunfire. Hundreds of the survivors were wounded, and many suffered lasting psychological harm.

Russian forces ultimately killed all but one of the known militants. The survivor, Nur-Pashi Kulayev, escaped the school and was nearly lynched before authorities captured him. He was convicted in 2006 of terrorism, hostage taking, and murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

Responsibility for the atrocity was claimed by Riyadus-Salikhin, a Chechen liberation group led by the notorious rebel warlord Shamil Basayev, who previously had been blamed for the takeover of a Moscow theatre in 2002 that ended in the deaths of some 130 hostages; the assassination of Akhmad Kadyrov, the pro-Moscow president of Chechnya, in May 2004; and countless other acts of terrorism and murder. The same group also claimed responsibility for suicide-bombing attacks on two Russian passenger jets that had crashed on August 24, 2004.

In the wake of these attacks, Putin introduced new and sweeping counterterrorism measures. He also proposed that regional governors—such as those in North Ossetia and Chechnya—no longer be popularly elected but instead be appointed by the president, subject to endorsement by regional legislatures, which the president would be empowered to dissolve if they rejected his nominations on two occasions. The legislation, which was approved by overwhelming majorities in both houses of the national legislature, returned Russia to the unitary system of government that had existed prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Within weeks of the attack, a Russian parliamentary commission was convened, and in December 2006 it issued a report that absolved the authorities of any blame in the outcome of the siege. Details of that report contradicted eyewitness testimony, and survivors and family members of victims characterized the official account as a whitewash. In November 2007 a group of more than 350 Beslan family members and survivors brought a civil suit against the Russian government in the European Court of Human Rights, the judicial organ of the Council of Europe. A second suit was filed in 2011 by an additional 55 Beslan survivors. In April 2017 the court ruled that Russian authorities had failed on numerous levels prior to and during the siege, and it awarded the victims $3.1 million in compensatory damages. The judgment found that officials had ignored concrete intelligence that indicated that an attack on the school was imminent. Additionally, the weapons used in the military response—which included flame throwers, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, thermobaric charges, antitank rockets, and T-72 main battle tanks—were both excessive and indiscriminate for the purposes of a hostage rescue. Russian officials rejected the findings, describing them as “utterly unacceptable,” and vowed to appeal the decision.