Hundreds of families were searching last night for their children and relatives among the wreckage of Middle School Number One, in hospitals and in the region’s morgue.
Three days after the bloody end to the Beslan siege, 180 were still listed as missing.
Distraught relatives, losing all faith in the ability of local authorities to control the situation, lined the streets with pictures of their missing children in the hope of receiving information from anyone who might have seen them.
As the town filled with wailing amid the first burials of the victims, photocopied pictures appeared on the streets around the blasted remains of the school.
One, of 12-year-old Aza Gumetsova, bore the words: ”If anyone knows of her whereabouts, please call this number.”
Next to her was pinned a photo of her classmate, Irina Pukhayeva: ”If you saw her after the explosion, please call …”
The official list of the missing was pasted over the walls of the Palace of Culture. It is a document increasingly laden with dread.
Valik Burnatsev and his wife had been there since the siege began five days ago. Yet still he knows nothing of his sister, Elvira (43) and her daughter, Diana, nine.
”We’ve looked all over the republic. In the hospitals. With our friends. In the morgue. We’ve put her name on the list of the missing.”
At the morgue in the regional capital Vladikavkaz, where the dead were gathered for identification, over 120 bodies still lay on the terrace outside in the light rain, their pungent smell filling the air.
Some bodies were so burned and blasted as to be unrecognisable to relatives. In the hospitals lay 386 injured, 58 of whom were in a critical condition.
Beslan’s families, those frantically searching and those already grieving, were on Sunday obsessed with the need for a response. In some cases they sought information. In others, revenge.
Rumours already began to circulate of acts of revenge. Russian media reported that some locals had headed into neighbouring Ingushetia — from where some of the militants are thought to have come — and abducted 10 Ingush men.
Valik Burnatsev’s expression cracked into a twisted smile when asked if he thought that there would be more bloodshed.
”Yes,” he nodded. ”There will be. I know a lot about that.” Asked what he meant, he looked up at the sky and said : ”Only God can tell you how it will happen.”
Aslan, a local prison official, sat smouldering in his kitchen with two colleagues.
His wife and daughter were saved, but he still shares the local anger.
He said: ”Today people are burying their dead. But tomorrow there will be something, I know.” He refused to say what or where.
His hatred for the government poured out of him. ”Our [North Ossetian] president is a Natasha” — local slang for a whore.
”It was absolute chaos during the siege. There was little federal help.”
The president of North Ossetia tearfully apologised for failing to avert the carnage.
”I fully understand my responsibility,” Alexander Dzasokhov told doctors and relatives of the wounded children in a hospital in Vladikavkaz. ”I want to beg your pardon for failing to protect children, teachers and parents.”
Anger grew towards the Kremlin and the distance it had kept from the hostage crisis.
President Putin did not dare meet relatives, who were asleep when he arrived in the middle of the night, nine hours after the siege had finished.
He and his two senior security ministers, Rashid Nurgaliyev, the interior minister, and Nikolai Patrushev, head of the security services, paid a brief visit. One local official said Nurgaliyev was there for an hour.
During the storming of the school the dead were carried out of the school on stretchers and taken to waiting cars and vans, ambulances being in short supply.
Seven of the elite Alfa and nine of the Vimpel special forces units died in the storming of the school, it was reported on Sunday.
Some of those who are unaccounted for are suspected to be young children in hospital who cannot identify themselves, but many others may have died in the explosions, shooting and fire that swept the school on Friday.
Officials say that were were more than 1 100 hostages in the school although the exact number is still not known. Only some of the dead have been identified and it may only be possible to identify many of the bodies through DNA tests.
During the siege no secure perimeter was set up by the hundreds of troops in the area, allowing locals into the area as the standoff continued.
Even on Sunday the chaos continued at the school. The site was open to the public, the grieving or even simply curious clambering over rubble that had a day earlier been the site of intensive mine sapper activity.
A policeman crouched next to an unexploded tank shell, part buried in the school’s playground, among the stream of visitors.
”Don’t tell anyone about this,” he said. ”Otherwise there will be panic. We’ve called a sapper, and we’ll get rid of it soon.”
An hour later it was gone.
The floorboards of the gym had been exposed by the constant scraping of visitors’ feet over its black, ashen covering. In the corridors, there remained a child’s shoe, exercise books, a blood-covered blackboard wiper, and a child’s rucksack.
The walls of the schoolrooms had been raked by automatic gunfire. A poster teaching children the vowels O, I, and E, using the Russian words for ”happy”, ”ticket” and ”eastern” clung forlornly to the walls.
Rescuers had made their final grim discovery late on Saturday night in the basement. A local health official said the bodies of up to 10 children were found there, the site of the final stand of one of the militants.
Prosecutors told Interfax on Sunday night that bodies of 30 of the 32 hostage takers had been found, and that they were Chechen, Ingush, Kazakh, Arabic and Slav in origin.
The whereabouts of the suspected leader, Magomed Yevloyev, were last night unknown.
Aslan Maskhadov, the moderate separatist leader of Chechnya, who has been sidelined by the extremists said his movement bore no responsibility for the takeover of the school, and last week’s dual airplane explosions and metro blast. He said in a statement that his independence movement would not target innocent civilians.
On Sunday the reason for the blast that sparked the storming of the school remained unclear according to official accounts, yet eyewitnesses were insistent that the first explosion was inside the gym.
One survivor, Ilfa Gagiyeva, a police investigator, said the explosion was accidental.
It happened when one of the mines strung up between the two basketball hoops in the gym fell off its wire and landed on the head of a hostage.
The young woman brushed it off her head, and it then exploded when it hit the ground, she said.
Then the shooting started. – Guardian Unlimited Â