Beslan residents, desperately searching for their missing relatives, have begun to suspect that the government has underestimated or tried to conceal the true casualty figures from the massacre.
The official death toll from the siege 16 days ago has remained at 329. Yet Zhana Gasiyeva, a deputy to the transport minister for North Ossetia, told The Guardian that 1 347 people had been taken hostage — a figure that contradicts the ministry of interior’s total of 1 189 and the general prosecutor’s figure of 1 156. A local newspaper last week printed a preliminary list of 1 388 people who it said had been inside Middle School Number 1.
Health officials have said that about 700 people sought medical or psychological help at local hospitals after the siege. That figure plus the official death toll of 329 would suggest that up to 300 former hostages walked away from the blast scene uninjured and sought no assistance.
Locals are confused as to how the number of dead can be so certain, while the number of hostages varies by nearly 200. The mistrust is fuelling local anger. At a meeting held in the Palace of Youth in Beslan, young men dismissed the government figures as elders tried to speak of calm.
”We know more about the number of dead than the [government] do”, said Zhuria. Another, who refused to give his name, said: ”Just look at the number of graves. It’s more.”
Survivors of the siege have described the scenes of carnage that occurred after the first bomb went off. One witness, Diana Komoyeva (14) told The Guardian after the siege that it was ”raining meat” inside the gym.
The deputy Russian prosecutor, General Vladimir Kolesnikov, told Interfax on Saturday that information was being ”regularly updated… and an official figure will be announced at the end of the investigation”. He added: ”The bodies of 81 victims, including 50 children, of them 32 girls and 18 boys, remain unidentified.”
Federal prosecutors have said 78 blood samples have been taken for DNA testing and local officials said last week that about 80 people were officially listed as missing.
At a railway depot on the outskirts of Beslan, relatives tried last week to identify the damaged bodies of victims. Four large refrigerated wagons sat on the railway. Relatives wore protective masks as they braved the smell of decaying flesh to climb into the wagons.
Slavik Hautov, in his 20s, made his fourth visit to the wagons on Wednesday to try to find his sister, Zarema (40). He was unsuccessful. ”They have taken my DNA”, he said, ”but it will take one and a half months for us to get a result.”
Forty-three Beslan victims remain in a serious, or very serious, condition in Moscow hospitals.
Angry parents descended on the local paper, Life on the Right Bank, to add names to a list of hostages. Elbrus Tetov was looking for his son, Timur (10). ”The majority of hostages were killed in the explosion,” he said. ”But now they are trying to tell us they ran away. There are more missing than dead.”
He said: ”Four different people have told me Timur ran away [after the first blast]. It is possible he was shot. At the start they told us there were 354 hostages, but there were really 1 100. They cannot hide it from us and if they do there will be a very serious social explosion.”
The Russian authorities have been accused by the relatives of victims of another hostage crisis, the Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow in October 2002, of not revealing the full extent of casualties.
A group of young Russians attacked four people from the Caucasus on a Moscow underground carriage, severely injuring them, the Interfax news agency reported.
Passengers told Interfax that the youths beat the four victims late on Saturday as the carriage travelled between stations in northern Moscow, shouting: ”This is what you get for terrorist attacks.”
Alexander Matonin, a spokesperson for the Moscow police, said that up to 50 young people had taken part in the attack. Police said they were treating the attack as hooliganism, but prosecutors told Interfax on Sundaty that they were taking over the investigation and had reclassified it as the more serious crime of causing hatred based on ethnic characteristics.
The four victims, described only as Caucasians, were taken to hospital with knife wounds, bruises and abrasions, Matonin said. One was in a serious condition. – Guardian Unlimited Â