Five years ago today, Chechen jihadists attacked a school and took more than 1,100 hostages. 334 adults and 186 young students died in the siege.

Read the memories of Jim Hoft and watch the BBC video of interviews with surviving children of Beslan.

AFP reports on the Beslan parents’ concern about ongoing jihadi violence:

Five years on, Russian authorities have not learnt from the Beslan hostage siege, survivors of one of Russia’s worst massacres in recent memory said Tuesday as they marked its grim anniversary.

Several hundred relatives and survivors gathered at the crumbling ruins of School Number One in this southern town to commemorate the hostage disaster that took the lives of over 330 people, including 186 children.
The painful memory of the massacre that left a host of questions unanswered is slowly fading away and President Dmitry Medvedev did not mention the Beslan siege as he congratulated Russians on the start of a new academic year.

Survivors and relatives of those who perished in the massacre said they had yet to see a fair investigation into the tragedy and complained that the security situation in the north Caucasus was deteriorating daily.

“Five years ago, after Beslan, we thought that the world had to change,” said Valentina Ostaniy, who was at the besieged school together with her son and nephew.
“But years later we see that nothing has changed. We are still afraid to send our children off to school because terror acts which have become yet more horrific and devious, take place in northern Caucasus every day.”

The world has seen much Islamic violence before and after this horrific massacre, but may we never see anything like this again.