Mother's choice: become a suicide bomber or your children will die

[Pirate Smile]

After almost a year in hospital, one woman tells the story of her decisive moments with hostage-takers

AFTER 11 operations and almost a year in hospital, Larissa Kudziyeva’s face is still severely disfigured, her injured arm too weak to work. The 41-year-old accountant wears dark glasses and drapes her hair over one cheek to mask the scars left by the grenade blast. Her blouse just covers the wound that nearly severed her right arm.

Yet she cannot believe her luck as she prepares to take her son, Zaurbek, back to school a year after armed men took them and 1,200 others hostage in Middle School No 1 in the North Ossetian town of Beslan.

Perhaps it was because of her striking looks that the hostage-takers singled her out as she tried to protect Zaurbek, then 7, and Medina, her 20-year-old daughter. Perhaps it was because she was wearing black to mourn the death of her husband a few months before.

She cannot explain exactly why one of the hostage-takers, calling himself Abdullah, took her aside on September 2, the second day of the siege, and made his spine-chilling offer. He said that Zaurbek, Medina and any other relatives could walk free. All she had to do was to strap on a belt of explosives and become a shakhidka, or suicide bomber, in support of their demands that Russia withdraw from neighbouring Chechnya.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1742594,00.html

[pop goes the weasel]

1. what a brave woman!

I hope that, if I am ever in such a crisis, that I will be able to be as clear-thinking and steady as she was in Beslan. She probably doesn't think of herself as brave, even, because she knows how scared she was, but if so, she underestimates herself. What a hero!

[LisaL]

2. Some people (like this woman) are heroes. And some are not.

I find it very ironic how some of the hostages told this woman that it was o'key for her to go and blow herself and others up because the hostage takers then might let the rest of them go.