First victims of Russian school siege buried

THE sound of weeping mothers who lost their sons and daughters in Russia’s school siege drifted out of the homes of Beslan on Sunday as the first burials were held for some of the 338 people killed.

Alina Khubechova celebrated her 11th birthday the day before Chechen separatists seized her school last week. Four days later her grief-stricken parents buried her, grasping a picture of the pretty brown-haired girl with white ribbons in her hair.

The president of North Ossetia, a southern province where the hostage drama unfolded, apologised for failing to avert it. “I fully understand my responsibility,” Alexander Dzasokhov told doctors and relatives of the wounded children in a hospital in the regional capital Vladikavkaz not far from Beslan.