Gunmen held hundreds of children and adults captive in a school gym into the night in turbulent southern Russia Thursday, but the Kremlin remained silent about an attack amounting to a huge humiliation.

Officials in North Ossetia, a province near unruly Chechnya, were trying to build contacts with 17 attackers who herded pupils, parents and teachers into the gym after bursting into a ceremony marking the start of a new school year Wednesday.

Soldiers and armored cars waited in darkness in adjacent streets. Officials said the gunmen had refused an offer to deliver food and water for the children aged between seven and 17.

The assault by the gang, which according to some accounts included women trained as suicide bombers, bore the signs of a Chechen rebel operation. It was the latest in a recent spate of deadly attacks in Russia which have killed more than 100.

It remained unclear who the attackers were. Chechen separatist leaders denied any links. Officials said contacts had been opened, but gave no details.

"Sometimes it is quiet and then they start firing again. Soldiers keep going back and forth," said Nikolai Dzaparov, whose 2-1/2-year-old grand-daughter was inside after attending the ceremony in the two-story brick building.

"No one tells us anything. Some people say there are up to 400 hostages. Some people say the terrorists are Chechens. Some people say they are Arabs. But we don't know."

Initial reports from the small provincial town of low-rise houses said the attackers had demanded the release of insurgents jailed after a June raid in Ingushetia, a region bordering Chechnya. But there was no official confirmation of this.

Officials said the gang had threatened to kill 50 children for any one of their comrades killed and to blow up the mined school if attacked.

The official numbers of hostages varied greatly between 120 and 400 and it was not clear how many were children.

Exhausted relatives milled about a cultural center, women in brightly-colored skirts, men with short dark hair, many smoking to pass the time.

Official statements said the gunmen wanted to speak with the presidents of Ingushetia and North Ossetia and prominent pediatrician Leonid Roshal.

Doctor gears for talks

Interfax news agency said Roshal, who helped win the release of children when Chechen rebels seized nearly 700 hostages in a Moscow theater in 2002, was in Beslan trying to get in touch with the militants.

President Vladimir Putin broke off his seaside holiday and rushed to Moscow to grapple with the mounting attacks that deal a blow to his security policies.

But Putin, whose hard-line tactics over Chechnya helped propel him to power in 2000, has said nothing in public about either the school attack or a bomb explosion at a Moscow underground station Tuesday which killed nine people.

A week earlier, two passenger planes were blown up apparently by suicide bombers, killing 90 people. Officials say they were almost certainly linked to Chechen rebels.

In a surprise move, Russia called for a U.N. Security Council meeting on "terrorist acts" in the country.

Moscow has for years rejected any outside role and criticism of its own role in Chechnya, insisting it was a domestic affair. But Russian officials have recently been pointing more to foreign involvement in the attacks, possibly linked to al Qaeda.

Putin and US President Bush discussed the string of attacks in Russia by telephone.

(China Daily via agencies September 2, 2004)