A Critical Analysis of 'Real Islam'. Its People ... - Bukti dan Saksi

involved in the negotiations. Correspondents say many of those released were desperate for water when
they came out, and some were barely able to stand. Many of the children were only partly clothed because
of the stifling heat in the gymnasium where they had been held since the militants took the building on
Wednesday. By Friday morning conditions were so bad that people could hardly breathe. Hostage Salimat
Suleimanova said: "So many children lay unconscious without food and water." Others reported: "Most of
kids were almost unconsciousness. Those who could move started to pee into shoes and then drink urine.
They would make several sips of urine and then would stop and cry because their lips were chapped and
the urine stung their skin."
Indira Dzetskelova, the mother of one of the child hostages in Beslan, Russia, reports that "several
15-year-old girls were raped by terrorists." Her daughter "heard their terrible cries and screams when
those monsters took them away." Her traumatized daughter Dzerase sobbed as she added: "When the
assault started, some of us were running out through the school dining room. "The terrorists started to
shoot from the roof, then one of them ran into the dining room and started to shoot from the window. "I
saw kids and women falling to the ground. And I saw that vermin's face. I saw his smile as he killed my
friends." Diana Gadzhieva, 14, was held with her sister Akinba, aged 11. She told how the rebels
executed all the adult men in a room upstairs. "We saw groups of men hostages going out and never
coming back." Other survivors told how screaming teenage girls were dragged into rooms adjoining the
gymnasium where they were being held and raped by their Chechen captors. An 18-month-old baby had
been repeatedly stabbed by a black-clad terrorist who had run out of ammunition.
A just rescued mother described the hostages' three days of hell in the Russian School Gymnasium.
She told reporters of the terrorists holding up the corpse of a man just shot dead in front of hundreds of
hostages, his pockets stuffed with ammunition and grenades, warning: "If a child utters even a sound,
we'll kill another one." When children fainted from lack of sleep, food and water, their masked and
camouflaged captors simply sneered. In the intolerable heat of the gym, adults implored children to drink
their own urine. Hours after escaping alive, a woman who had been taken hostage with her 7-year-old son
and her mother spoke of three days of unspeakable horror of children so wired with fear they couldn't
sleep, of captors coolly threatening to kill hostages one by one, of a gymnasium so cramped there was
hardly room to move. "We were in complete fear," said Alla Gadieyeva, 24, who spoke to an Associated
Press reporter, as she lay collapsed in exhaustion on a stretcher outside a hospital. "People were praying
all the time, and those that didn't know how to pray we taught them".
Alla told reporters that she and her mother, Irina, were in the school courtyard Wednesday seeing off
her son, Zaur, on his first day of school when they heard sounds like "balloons popping." She thought the
noise was part of school festivities. But then five masked gunmen burst into the courtyard, shooting in the
air and ordering people to get inside the building. Children, parents and teachers Alla estimated there
were about 1000, were herded into the gymnasium. Alla said children whimpered in fear, and all around
there was screaming and crying. The hostages were forced to crouch, their hands folded over their heads.
For the rebels, the first order of business was confiscating cell phones. They smashed the phones, then
delivered a warning: "If we find any mobile phones, we will shoot 20 people all around you." The
gymnasium was quickly transformed into an arsenal of explosive bombs dangling from the ceiling, set on
the floor, strung up on walls. She said they seemed to be homemade, primitive packages containing bolts
and nails. On the first day, people got a tiny bit of water to drink, but no food. After that, Alla said,
nothing. When she asked the rebels for water for her mother, they laughed at her. "My mother was
terrified, and I thought she was having a heart attack. When I saw my son, my mother ... go unconscious,
so tired, so thirsty, I wanted it all to come to an end," she said. "When children began to faint, they
laughed," Alla said. "They were totally indifferent." During the ordeal, Zaur became so traumatized that
he would flinch whenever someone touched him, or even brushed by him, she said. As with most of the
other children, his only spells of sleep were the times he fell unconscious from thirst and exhaustion.
When asked how her son would remember the ordeal, Alla replied: "How can a person ever forget it?
Would you ever forget it?" As Alla spoke under a grove of spruce trees, she had not yet been reunited
with her mother or son, although authorities confirmed to her that they were alive. She recounted how the
hostage-takers eventually took off their masks. They had beards, long hair, and spoke with Chechen
accents, she said. "They're not human beings," Alla said. "What they did to us, I can't understand."