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According to local officials, a drone was shot down by air defence above a shopping mall in Vladikavkaz, in nearby North Ossetia, that morning.

Authorities in the nearby Russian regions of Ingushetia and North Ossetia reported drone strikes on Wednesday morning.

On a visit to the school and to mothers of the victims in North Ossetia, he said "just as we fought with terrorists previously, now we fight with those who commit crimes in Kursk region, Donbas and Novorossiya", using an old Russian imperial term for areas of occupied Ukraine.

Four years later, Chechen rebels took 1,000 hostages, most of them children, at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia.

The chilly mountain region where they reside is in a mining town in North Ossetia, a Russian republic in the North Caucasus, an area still raw with the memories of civil warfare and extremist violence.