Beslan school siege
Militants seize a school on day one of term: 186 children die
On 1 September 2004 militants sent by Shamil Basayev seized a school in Beslan with over 1,100 hostages, mostly children and parents. On the third day explosions in the gym set off a storm; 334 hostages died, 186 of them children. The security forces' use of heavy weapons in the assault remains disputed.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 24 years earlier
- 1981 AIDS first described — 23 years earlier
- 1997 Kyoto Protocol — 7 years earlier
- 2008 Global financial crisis — 4 years later
Europe
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 15 years earlier
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 15 years earlier
- 2002 Euro notes and coins — 2 years earlier
- 2010 Eurozone debt crisis — 6 years later
- 2012 Discovery of the Higgs boson — 8 years later
Middle East
- 1992–1993 War in Abkhazia — 12 years earlier
- 1993 Oslo Accords — 11 years earlier
- 2003 Rose Revolution — 1 year earlier
- 2008 Russo-Georgian War — 4 years later
- 2011–2024 Syrian civil war — 7 years later
Africa
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 21 years earlier
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 10 years earlier
- 1998–2003 Second Congo War — 6 years earlier
- 2011 Independence of South Sudan — 7 years later
Asia
- 2001–2021 US war in Afghanistan — 3 years earlier
- 2001 China joins the WTO — 3 years earlier
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami — same year
- 2008 Sichuan earthquake — 4 years later
- 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami — 7 years later
Americas
- 1983 ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 21 years earlier
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 3 years earlier
- 2003 Human genome sequenced — 1 year earlier
- 2007 Apple unveils the iPhone — 3 years later
- 2010 Haiti earthquake — 6 years later
Oceania
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 12 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 86)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 74)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 93)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 85)
- Jimmy Carter (aged 80)
- Fidel Castro (aged 78)
- Elizabeth II (aged 78)
- Gabriel García Márquez (aged 77)
- Mikhail Gorbachev (aged 73)
- Boris Yeltsin (aged 73)