Russia Calls for Explanation Over Beslan Comments

Moscow has angrily demanded the Dutch EU presidency explain comments it made in the wake of the school siege in the Russian town of Beslan. The demand follows comments from Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot in which Bot apparently asked the Russian authorities to account for the siege's bloody end. "In a situation when the whole world knew that the main priority was saving children, and that there would be no storming, to hear such words from a minister seems to us to be blasphemy," Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told the Guardian newspaper. Bot, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, promised to calm the incident by talking to Russian foreign minister to assure him that he was not looking for a justification from Moscow and it was a misunderstanding. (EUobserver.com)