Russia buries school hostage slaughter victims

Families wracked with grief crowded into a freshly turned field next to the cemetery in Beslan today to bury loved ones killed in the school hostage seizure.

Earlier in the day, dozens of men had dug rows of graves in preparation for the more than 20 funerals scheduled for today.

“I wanted to help. The grief is for all of our people,” said Anzor Kudziyev, 25, who was one of about 60 volunteer gravediggers.

“When a person goes to the cemetery for a burial, it’s sad, but nothing like this – when you dig graves for your children,” said Kudziyev, whose neighbour’s children were hospitalised.

Throughout Beslan, coffin lids leaned against apartment house entrances, alongside wooden stakes bearing names of the dead. Wailing echoed through some courtyards, where families were preparing food for ritual meals, while people walked the streets with stony, expressionless faces.

Regional emergency situations minister Boris Dzgoyev said 326 people, including 159 children, were killed and more than 540 people were wounded, mostly children.

Medical officials said 423 people remained in hospital, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

A shaken President Vladimir Putin went on national television yesterday to make a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness in the face of an “all-out war” by terrorists.

He told the Russian people that they must mobilise against terrorism and promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption.

“We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten,” he said in an address aimed at addressing the grief, shock and anger felt by many after a string of terrorist attacks that have killed some 450 people in the past two weeks, apparently in connection with the war in Chechnya.

In Beslan Vladimir, a 42-year-old resident who did not want to give his last name, said he had already visited four households where friends were mourning their losses.

“The city is small. Everybody knows each other. We’re all related,” he said.

Outside one building, concentric circles of women and men surrounded the open coffin of 32-year-old Anzhela Barziyeva, who had brought her 7-year-old son Mairbek to School No. 1 on Wednesday for the ceremony celebrating his first day in first grade. She was killed after pushing Mairbek through a window to safety the child was in the hospital after being wounded.

As a light rain fell in the early afternoon, funeral processions that were snaking through the streets converged, filling the road to the cemetery with a long line of cars. Weeping mourners placed flowers and wreaths at the graves that had been dug in an adjoining field, including one where two sisters were being laid to rest together.

Rossiya state television said 22 funerals were scheduled.

At the school at the centre of the tragedy, window sills were strewn with red and pink roses, and abandoned children’s shoes littered the floor. People clutched photos of their relatives whom they had not found among either the living or the dead.

“I lost my boy,” cried Svetlana Debloyeva, 42, whose rounds of hospitals and morgues have turned up no sign of her 11-year-old son Zaur. The two became separated during the chaotic, bloody end of the hostage crisis on Friday.

President Vladimir Putin decreed two days of national mourning on Monday and Tuesday, when flags will fly at half-mast and entertainment programming is to be cancelled.