Reluctant militants may have been killed by leader

MILITANTS appear to have planned their seizure of a Russian school carefully, starting months earlier and sneaking weapons into the building in advance.

Still, some of the raiders may not have known what they were getting into and were appalled to find they were holding children hostage.

There are indications that some of the objecting militants were killed by their own comrades.

Umar Sikoyev, a lawyer for the captured raider identified as Nur-Pashi Kulayev, said the band's leader did not tell them what their mission was and that, after the seizure, a fierce argument broke out in the band with several of them objecting that seizing children as hostages was wrong.

The raid's commander shot the dissidents' leader to death and then detonated the suicide belts worn by two women raiders by remote control to establish order in the band, Sikoyev said.

Pieces of the picture of how militants took more than 1,000 hostages at the school in Beslan reveal months of cold, careful planning.

Officials are saying little publicly but Russian news reports, citing unspecified sources, portray the raid as a fastidiously prepared operation taking place almost literally under authorities' noses.

School Number One in Beslan is only about 200 yards from the local police headquarters.

"Why the law enforcement bodies didn't know and why they allowed a column of fighters to get into the city past all checkpoints this is something that can be judged only through rumours," the newspaper Novye Izvestia said today.

Russian news agencies cited unnamed security sources as saying that the planners of the raid were believed to have scouted at least two schools in Beslan.

"Judging by everything, they felt the better one for their goals was the main building of School Number One with its half-basement gymnasium annex, where the floor had to be replaced," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted a law-enforcement official as saying.

"The bandits were able to bring into the school a large quantity of weapons, ammunition, equipment and explosives, under the guise of planks, cement and other building material, enough to defend the seized place for a long period."

Regional security service head Valery Andreyev appeared to reluctantly agree. "The special services are carefully checking the version that the terrorists brought in arms, explosives and ammunition ahead of time," he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

That hypothesis appears to conform with other details of the seizure. About 30 raiders arrived in a single military-style truck believed to have been hijacked in neighbouring Ingushetia which, jammed with people, would have been too small to carry much equipment.

Hostages gave accounts of a huge quantity of explosives in the school, not only the suicide belts worn by some of the raiders but also bombs hung from basketball hoops and a two-foot-square bomb was built in the centre of the gym.

Such a plan also blackly echoed some of the recent years' most brazen terrorist attacks, including the 2002 Moscow theatre siege.