Teenager Sado Nazriyv was excited about the first day of school. He put on his pressed white shirt and his fancy black suit and joined his lifelong friend, Kazbek Dzaragasov, in front of the red-brick School No 1 for opening-day ceremonies. A pop song from the 1980s played on the speakers, a musty oldie, something about childhood, innocence. ‘‘As soon as the song ended,’’ Sado recalled, ‘‘the terrorists showed up.’’ A small army of guerrillas stormed through the schoolyard with rifles and explosives on Wednesday morning, barking orders at hundreds of students and parents. ‘‘Lie on the ground!’’ they shouted. Most students complied. Sado and Kazbek did not. ‘‘They started shooting,’’ said Sado, 16, still reeling from the experience a day later. ‘‘At first we thought it was a joke. Where I was, there were 10th-grade students and 11th-grade students. We saw them running and so we started running, too.’’ Sado and Kazbek raced as fast as they could, bullets whizzing overhead. Sado cut down a side lane, he recalled, but Kazbek did not follow. Suddenly Kazbek, 15, realized that his younger sister, Agunda, was still back at the school in her third-grade class, a captive of the mysterious attackers. He turned and rushed back into the school, giving up his escape to become a hostage alongside his terrified sister. ‘‘They’re very close kids,’’ said their grandmother, Rosa Dzaragasova, 76. The last word anyone has had of the teenage boy came on Thursday afternoon when one of the women released by the guerrillas told Sado that she saw Kazbek and his sister huddled together in the gym with other hostages. At first, no one could fathom what was happening. ‘‘We ran to the police and started screaming at them that the school had been taken captive,’’ Sado said. ‘‘They didn’t believe us at first. They were confused.’’ Kristina Varziyeva, 16, was among a group of students collected by the intruders. ‘‘All the students were being herded into the gym at gunpoint,’’ said her mother Sima Varziyeva, 55. ‘‘A guerrilla who was herding them turned away and she understood that she wasn’t being followed and ran to the boiler room.’’ An English teacher grabbed Kristina’s hand and shuffled her and a dozen other students into the room as well, slamming a heavy iron door shut behind them, according to her mother. The guerrillas couldn’t break the door down. Finally, they smashed a window and ran to safety. ‘‘She was terribly scared and shocked. She’s now scared to be in darkness, she’s scared to be alone,’’ said Varziyeva. —(LAT-WP)
