European court of human rights says security at school was not increased despite prior warning of attack

Russian authorities failed to take sufficient steps to stop the 2004 Beslan school siege in North Ossetia in which more than 330 people were killed, the European court of human rights has ruled.

The court said Russian authorities had received information that a terror attack was being planned and security at the school was not increased sufficiently.

Chechen militants stormed the school on 1 September 2004, beginning a three-day hostage crisis involving more than 1,100 hostages. The death toll included 184 children.

Ten years after Beslan school siege, survivors struggle to make a new life Read more

“The authorities had been in possession of sufficiently specific information of a planned terrorist attack in the area, linked to an educational institution,” the court said in its judgment. “Nevertheless, not enough had been done to disrupt the terrorists meeting and preparing.”

It added that “insufficient steps had been taken to prevent them [the terrorists] travelling on the day of the attack; security at the school had not been increased; and neither the school nor the public had been warned of the threat”.

The court also ruled that Russian authorities breached European human rights laws when they stormed the school. A further 750 people were wounded when security forces – using “tank cannon, grenade launchers and flamethrowers”, the court said – moved in to free the hostages.

It said this “contributed to the casualties among the hostages” and broke treaty requirements to respect the “right to life” by failing to restrict lethal force to that which was “absolutely necessary”.

It added that the command structure of the operation “suffered from a lack of formal leadership, resulting in serious flaws in decision-making and coordination with other relevant agencies”.

The case was brought by more than 400 Russians who were either involved in the incident or whose relatives were taken hostage or killed.

The Kremlin reacted angrily to the judgment and said it could not agree with the court’s conclusion. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the court’s criticism of Russia was unacceptable given that the country had been the victim of terrorist attacks.

The militants at Beslan were demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from the war-torn republic of Chechnya. They rigged the school gymnasium with explosives and packed the hostages inside, around 800 of whom were children.

They executed a number of hostages, refused to accept any offers aimed at alleviating the hostages’ situation and denied even drinking water to their victims.

On 3 September, two powerful explosions occurred in the gymnasium, and as some of the hostages tried to escape through the hole in the wall the terrorists fired on them. This prompted an exchange of gunfire with the security forces, who were then ordered to storm the building. Many of the dead and injured remained in the gymnasium, which was engulfed in flames before the roof collapsed.

Marina Mikhailova, a primary school teacher who survived the siege but lost her father in the attack, described the ordeal and the effect on the town. “Today in Beslan, people only have tears in their eyes; people only have grief. Children are children, and the children’s laughter is the only thing that makes everyone better,” she wrote.

The Beslan massacre was one of a string of brutal attacks in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s stemming mainly from an insurgency in Chechnya that morphed from a separatist rebellion into a Islamist campaign.

The overwhelmingly Muslim Russian North Caucasus has since emerged as one of the major sources of foreign jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq.

After the attack, Putin refused to order a public inquiry and said there was no connection between Russian policies in Chechnya and the events in Beslan. “Just imagine that people who shoot children in the back came to power anywhere on our planet. Just ask yourself that, and you will have no more questions about our policy in Chechnya,” he said at the time.

Last year five women wearing T-shirts blaming the Russian leader for the massacre, as well as two journalists trying to film the brief protest, were detained during a ceremony commemorating victims of the siege. Four of the women had lost children in the siege and one had also lost her husband. The fifth woman’s daughter survived.