VIENNA, Austria (AP) – In Iraq, they’ve sawed off people’s heads in grisly executions shown on the Internet. In Israel, they’ve blown themselves up inside packed buses. Now, in Russia, they’ve turned a school into a slaughterhouse.

Extremists have become chillingly brazen in singling out so-called “soft targets” – and counterterrorism experts say they fear nothing is off-limits anymore to those intent on achieving maximum punch, publicity and paranoia.

This week’s bloody school standoff in southern Russia, shattered whatever might have remained of the notion that innocents are taboo terror victims.

“They’re crossing thresholds – no question about it,” said Jonathan Stevenson, a terrorism expert with the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Militants “are becoming much more educated in terms of what will have an effect,” said Sandra Bell, director of homeland security at the Royal United Services Center, a London think tank.

Extremists in Russia’s breakaway Chechnya region increasingly have adopted the tactics of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida and other Middle Eastern terrorism groups, said Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based counterterrorism expert. Soft targets such as hospitals, theaters and concerts, have been a Chechen hallmark since the start of the conflict a decade ago.

“They have blown up mosques, attacked transportation infrastructure, destroyed planes and now conducted a mass hostage-taking,” he said.

“These groups are copycats and imitative, not innovative. … In terms of scale, this is unprecedented and follows the category of spectacular and theatrical attacks akin to al-Qaida.”

Experts tracking terrorist cells say the trend toward soft targets is undeniable – and probably unstoppable.

One explanation for the shift is that tactics that triggered international outrage just 20 years ago – such as the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian militants who killed a wheelchair-bound American tourist and tossed his body overboard – might seem relatively tame to a world stunned by the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Militants are now trying to damage their enemies any way they can, to search for soft targets such as schools and underground stations,” said Dia’a Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on Islamic extremism.

Palestinian militant groups are unlikely to follow the Russian militants’ lead and take schoolchildren hostage because it could detract from their aim to be seen as “resistance fighters, not terrorists,” Rashwan said.

The Quran admonishes the followers of Islam that not even the children of infidels should be killed. The Palestinian militant group Hamas contends its policy is not to target children, although it justifies attacks on civilians to avenge Israeli army attacks on ordinary citizens.

Abu Mahmoud, a spokesman for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank, said the group was “shocked by what we see on television” about the Russian school standoff.

“We would never agree to such a thing,” he said. “We never did such a thing and never would. When there is an explosion and children are killed, we are sorry for this because this was a mistake, not on purpose.”

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AP writers Beth Gardiner in London, Paul Garwood in Cairo and Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City contributed to this story.

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