As many as 1,500 people, not officially reported 350, are being held hostage in the school seized by armed attackers Wednesday morning in southern Russia, Russian press quoted freed hostages as saying Friday.

Freed hostages told the Kommersant Daily and Izvestiya Daily that as many as 1,500 hostages may be held by armed militants in the Russian school in North Ossetia republic.

Zalina Dzandarova, 27, told the Kommersant Daily ,"You know, there aren't 350, but 1,500 altogether."

"On television they say that there are 350 of us. That's not right. There are no less than 1,500 in the school," Izvestiya Daily reported, quoting a woman who was among the first 26 people released on Thursday.

There were more than 1,000 students in the school with almost the same number of their parents, and all the hostages are held in the gymnasium under guard by six or seven captors.
 
The female, a school teacher who was freed with one of three of her seized children, said mothers with babies under the age of two were released because the infants had kept crying.
 
She said it was hard to breath inside the school building as the militants have closed all the windows.

"The hostage-takers only have one demand -- the federal troops must withdraw from Chechnya," the freed female teacher said, adding that the terrorists seldom talk loudly with each other.

"The attackers did not physically torture the hostages, but sometimes asked those male to do some work," she noted.

The junior students were badly frightened and the militants would open fire in the sky to stop the children from crying, she said.

There have been no official comments on the latest revealed number of hostages in the school.

(Xinhua News Agency September 3, 2004)