With jet-black hair pulled tightly back and multiple earrings, Kristina Atayeva could be an average teenager, but the headaches, sore eyes, high blood pressure and sharp kidney pains she suffers from are more common in someone four times her age.
With jet-black hair pulled tightly back and multiple earrings, Kristina Atayeva could be an average teenager, but the headaches, sore eyes, high blood pressure and sharp kidney pains she suffers from are more common in someone four times her age.
Kristina, her two sisters and mother Anzhela were among 1,000 children and parents taken hostage by Chechen separatists on the first day of the new school year on September 1, 2004.
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Still Mourning: Women at a memorial inside the Beslan school gymnasium yesterday. |
After three days of siege, Russian forces stormed the school and some of the rebels blew themselves up. A total of 333 hostages more than half of them children were killed in the chaos and hundreds were wounded.
Another 72 were left disabled, and five years later, the parents of those victims and others scarred psychologically say the governmentu00a0 has not done enough to help them recover from the ordeal.
