About 200 chidlren hostages on Friday managed to escape the school when Russian special forces stormed the school seized by gunmen Wednesday morning and hostage-takers tried to flee the school.

Gunfire and large explosions continued even after the special forces took control of the school.

Five hostage-takers were killed and Russian special forces werepursuing two female kidnappers, dressed in white, who managed to flee the seiged school towards the south of the town.

The Interfax news agency said that several hostage-takers who managed to escape the storming of school are in a local residence surrounded by Russian troops.

It also said that all the hostages have been evacuated from the school gymnasium.

Russian TV footage show paramedics carrying stretchers entered the school and brought children to amublences.

Some half-naked children drank heavily from bottles of water after two days without drink.

Interfax said some of the hostage-takers, believed to number about 40, had tried to break out through crowds of frantic relatives waiting near the school as Russian special forces moved in.
It was unclear what had triggered the battle, a few hours after Russia insisted it would not resort to force to free the children,parents and teachers being held hostage for a third day.

Alexander Dzasokhov, president of the republic of North Ossetia, said the 40 or so masked gunmen were demanding an independent Chechnya, the first clear link between them and the decade-long separatist rebellion in the neighboring Russian republic.

The Itar-Tass news agency said special forces had blown a hole in a school building to let hostages escape. Witnesses, who stood around 150 meters from the school, saw three armored personnel carriers with heavily armed soldiers on board approaching the school.

The hostage crisis came after Russia suffered a series of terrorist attacks over the past week.

An explosion near a metro station Tuesday in northeast Moscow killed 10 people and injured 37 others.

The explosion came after Sunday's presidential election in Russia's Chechen republic, in which Kremlin-backed Alu Alkhanov won a landslide victory to replace pro-Moscow Akhmad Kadyrov who was killed in a terrorist bomb blast on May 9.

Just five days before the election, two Russian passenger planes crashed almost simultaneously, killing all the 90 people aboard. The incidents aroused fears that terrorist attacks were behind the tragedies.

Traces of explosives were found aboard both planes and investigators suspected that two female Chechen passengers -- eachaboard one aircraft -- might have brought down the planes.

A group called the "Islambouli Brigades" have claimed responsibility for the twin crashes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that an al-Qaida link to the crashes of two Russian airliners last week confirms a connection between Chechen rebels and international terrorism.

Chechnya, a war-torn republic in Russia's Northern Caucasus, won de-facto independence in 1996 after the pullout of Russian troops. Federal soldiers returned to the lawless republic in September 1999. Since then, a guerrilla war between Chechen rebelsand federal troops has persisted, occasionally spilling into neighboring regions.

Putin also said Wednesday that the government is prepared to hold talks with all forces in Chechnya, except terrorists and separatists.

"There can be no dialogue with those who wanted to fight and who made war a way of earning money. We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them," the Russian president told journalists from leading Turkish media outlets following an interview with a Turkish television company.