At last count, over 330 Russians – over half of them children – were killed in the atrocious terrorist standoff at a school in Beslan, Russia last week. With the nation now mourning over the dozens of graves, Christian groups have expressed a deep solidarity with the victims and began to pray “for an end to such violence” in the world.

The Council of the Lutheran World Federation, representing some 62 million Lutherans, said it was “horrified by the news of the bloodshed”. The Council described the incident as an “atrocity [that] evokes a particularly strong sense of revulsion, because the armed insurgents who planned it and carried it out deliberately targeted children. No cause can justify such inhumanity.”

It then called on the global LWF communion to “pray for an end to the violence in the world and in human hearts, for the transformation of those whose hearts have been hardened by violence, and the liberation of those trapped in its vicious cycle.”