On this day, Sept. 1: Beslan school hostage crisis killed nearly 340 in Russia
Sept. 1 (UPI) -- On this date in history, the world remembers the 2004 Beslan school siege, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Russian history, alongside other notable events.
In 2004, on the opening day of the school year, armed Chechen separatists stormed School No. 1 in Beslan in Russia's North Ossetia region and took more than 1,000 students, teachers and parents hostage. The siege stretched into a third day before a volley of explosions and heavy gunfire triggered a chaotic rescue. Nearly 340 people were killed, including many children, and hundreds more were left wounded. Chechen commander Shamil Basayev later said his fighters carried out the attack. The massacre drew global condemnation and sorrow, while inside Russia, it laid bare grave security failures and prompted the Kremlin to centralize power and intensify its decade-long struggle with separatist violence in the North Caucasus.
Other notable events on Sept. 1:
In 1715, France's King Louis XIV died after ruling France for 72 years, the longest reign of any French monarch.
In 1807, former U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr was acquitted of treason charges related to an alleged plot to create an independent empire in the American South and West.
In 1914, the last known passenger pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo, marking the final chapter for the once abundant North American species.
In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck Japan, destroying much of Tokyo and Yokohama and killing an estimated 143,000 people.
In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Adolf Hitler was pictured reviewing infantry during the campaign. Great Britain and France issued ultimatums that Hitler ignored, and Sept. 1 is widely considered the start of World War II.
In 1964, Masanori Murakami became the first Japanese player to appear in a Major League Baseball game, playing for the San Francisco Giants in a 4-1 loss to the New York Mets. He spent the rest of the 1964 season and the 1965 season in San Francisco before returning to Japan to play for the Nankai Hawks.
In 1972, American Bobby Fischer defeated Soviet world champion Boris Spassky in the world chess championship, a Cold War showdown that captured worldwide attention.
In 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747, was shot down by a Soviet fighter jet after straying into Soviet airspace. All 269 people on board died.
In 1985, scientists located the wreck of the British luxury liner Titanic, which had sunk in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, in the Atlantic Ocean south of Newfoundland.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush established diplomatic relations with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as the Baltic states regained their independence from the Soviet Union.
In 1998, a U.S. law went into effect requiring all vehicles sold in the country to have airbags on both sides of the front seat.
In 2008, Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Louisiana southwest of New Orleans as a Category 2 storm, forcing about 2 million people to evacuate. The city's levee system, rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina, held against a 12-foot storm surge.
In 2015, Pope Francis said priests could grant forgiveness to women who had undergone abortions, as long as they sought repentance during the upcoming extraordinary jubilee.
In 2019, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas as a Category 5 storm, killing 84 people — most of them in the Bahamas, with additional deaths in Puerto Rico, Florida and North Carolina — and causing more than $4 billion in damage.
In 2020, BTS became the first all-Korean musical group to top the Billboard Hot 100 with their single "Dynamite."
In 2022, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory committee recommended the first reformulated COVID-19 booster shot to combat the Omicron variants of the virus.