CHICAGO -- As gunmen seized a school full of hostages in southern Russia last week, President Vladimir Putin had held a meeting that might have seemed to some like a distraction.
State visits are arranged long in advance, and when King Abdullah II of Jordan arranged a trip to the Kremlin, neither side could have known of the catastrophe that would occur in Beslan.
A group of terrorists reported to be Chechens and Arabs seized a school, wired it with explosives and held over 1,500 people hostage, calling for independence for the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya. The crisis ended with the death of hundreds, many of them children.