Some 350 wounded in Russian school chaos

Agence France Presse
Sept 3 2004

BESLAN – Around 350 local residents and former hostages have been
taken to hospital after being wounded in the hostage siege in Russia,
Inferfax reported.

A source in the local health ministry told the agency that some have
been hospitalised in the regional capital Vladikavkaz, while others
have gone to the two hospitals in Beslan, the southern Russian town
where the hostage drama took place.

One hundred and fifty-eight children are among those taken to
hospital in Beslan, a source close to the regional president told
Moscow Echo radio.

The children ensnared in the three-day hostage drama in North Ossetia
will probably suffer major psychological damage and some may never
get over their ordeal completely, a French expert has warned.

Gilbert Vila, a paediatrician who specialises in child trauma at
Paris’s Necker Hospital, said a child subjected to a deep shock of
this kind was likely to show a long range of symptoms, including
anxiety, depression, turbulence at school and problems in his family
relationships.

“This case is of the gravest kind,” he told AFP. “The psychological
problems will be major.”

Vila has authored several studies into the psychological impact
on children who suffer a catastrophic shock, including a group of
primary-school children taken hostage at their school in the Paris
suburb of Neuilly in 1993.

Detailed research into Cambodian children who were tortured under
the Pol Pot regime and Armenian children who survived an earthquake
shows that, for most victims, the big symptoms will gradually ease
but for a minority the problems will be lifelong, Vila said.

In those cases, 90% of the children showed significant trauma symptoms
during the first few weeks after their trauma.

That figure fell to 50% after six months, and to around 15% two or
three years later. Some, though, were never completely cured.

In the Cambodian study, “some children who were aged between eight
and 12 years at the time of their ordeal were still experiencing
problems at the age of 30,” he said.

More than half of the children in this category had problems that
seriously hampered their daily life.

As for very young children and babies, “we still lack data” on the
long-term repercussions, said Vila, noting however that there had been
cases of children younger than four “who showed the same post-trauma
symptoms as (US) Vietnam vets.”

The latest news reports by RIA Novosti news agency say that a fire has
broken out at the southern Russian school where troops and militants
with hundreds of hostages fought a three-hour battle.

Firefighters had trouble approaching the building to extinguish the
blaze due to continuing gunfire there, the agency reported.

The report said the blaze triggered an explosion in the school.