Even six months later, their traces remain in the thick snow: the tent strings laced to a tree, the makeshift tap made from a bottle, the rubbish heap.
It was here, deep in the woods near the village of Psedakh in Ingushetia, that 32 gunmen gathered in August last year for up to seven days before they took 1 227 people hostage at Beslan’s Middle School One.
Khamid Tsechoyev, head of the village, pointed at the ground. ”There used to be teapots and coffee packets here — a toilet here.” Raising his arm to the hills obscured by the forest he said: ”Direct, it’s 20km to Beslan.”
Nearly six months after the massacre of 318 hostages, few of the mysteries surrounding the siege of Beslan have been unravelled.
A five-month criminal investigation claims to have found some of the pieces of jigsaw, but by no means all. And for the people of Beslan there remains immense frustration that the picture is still unclear.
Responding to The Guardian, the prosecutor in charge of the inquiry, Nikolai Shepel, has made a number of claims. The first explosion, he insists, was from within the building, and was not caused by some ”outside influence”.
He also claims one of the gunmen rang Saudi Arabia hours before the school was stormed, and appeared to be a Saudi citizen.
In a statement, Shepel said two Arab mercenaries, named Abu Kuteib (now deceased) and Abu Dzeit, trained the gunmen at a camp in the woods of the Sunzhenski region on the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia.
Another visitor to the camp, according to Shepel, was Russia’s most wanted man, the leading Chechen separatist militant Shamil Basayev.
Investigators also say tests revealed that 21 of the 31 gunmen who died in the storming of the building had heroin or morphine in their bloodstreams. Another six used light drugs ranging from codeine to marijuana.
Five local, low-ranking police officers have been charged with negligence contributing to the tragedy.
Shepel said the group was led by Ruslan Khuchbarov, known as the ”Colonel”, whom he has seen on a videotape meeting with Abu Dzeit a few days before the attack. The latter is said to have asked Khuchbarov: ”Are you ready to meet Allah?” He replied: ”I am ready.”
Shepel also said the separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov ”took active participation” in preparing the hostage-taking, as well as a June 21 attack on the Ingushetian capital, Nazran, in which militants killed over a hundred policemen.
Over the past five months a series of contradictory reports and theories have sewn confusion in Beslan among relatives of the dead. Amid such uncertainty, relatives of the victims have set about filling in some of the gaps and pointing their anger at individuals who survived, as well as conjuring conspiracy theories that confuse the situation further.
One of the targets for local anger is the school’s director, Lidia Tsaliyeva. She is vilified because, local people claim, she hired the builders over the summer who hid a cache of arms in the school for the gunmen. Tsaliyeva (72) who worked at the school for 52 years, denies the accusations, but has become the focus of much local anger.
Anyeta Gadieva, who runs a pressure group, the Committee of Victims’ Mothers, said: ”They hid arms there. Lidia was negligent and should have known.”
Gadieva was released on the second day of the siege with her daughter Milena, aged one. She had to leave behind her other daughter, Alana (10) who died.
”[Separatist militant leader] Shamil Basayev said it was him, but why?” she asks. ”To destabilise the Caucuses? Because of an order? Or to discredit Putin? And if he did it, why was our government so weak, and did not save our children?”
Locals are also intrigued by the discovery of six used shoulder-mounted rocket launchers — known as ”Shmels” — on the roofs of two apartment blocks opposite the school. They have called into question the assumption that the first explosion inside the school had been caused by a mine inside the hall set off accidentally.
While evidence remains thin, some survivors have talked about the explosion being like ”a lightning strike”.
Zifa Tsirikhova (40) told The Guardian: ”The ceiling caught fire and fell down … and that would not have happened if the blast came from inside.”
Alexander Torshin, a Russian senator heading the ”independent” commission asked by President Vladimir Putin to investigate the attack, has said the rocket launchers could be evidence that a ”third force” was near the school.
”The main thing now is to understand to whom they [the Shmel] belong. It is a very difficult question that also deals with accomplices [the gunmen may have had],” he said.
He said negotiations had appeared to be going well that day, and ”I have a feeling that some other force — I do not know who — was present which did not want any peaceful solution. I am sure it was not the FSB [the Russian security service], but I am also sure that it was not the majority of the terrorists. Not all of them came to the school to die in it.”
Evidence of ”training camps” in Ingushetia have also fuelled tensions between North Ossetia — where Beslan is — and neighbouring Ingushetia, where some of the gunmen were apparently from.
But the uncertainty only exacerbates Gadieva’s anger and pain. ”They try to tell us it was an enemy from outside [Russia], but they were from Chechnya and Ingushetia, whose population should not have let them be on their land.”
Yet she added: ”It is important to me who did it, who unleashed that devil, who decided to pursue their political ambitions with the deaths of children.
”But we have tried to do our own investigation, and been left with only assumptions. 100% evidence does not exist.” – Guardian Unlimited Â