Beslan mourns at school massacre funerals

Funeral processions snaked through Beslan today as relatives buried the first victims of the Russian school siege, while frantic parents still searched for missing children two days after the crisis erupted into violence that left more than 350 people dead.

Wails of mourning women echoed from courtyards where families made ritual meals and from a football-field sized plot of land next to the cemetery where men dug graves as surveyors across the road marked out new plots with wooden stakes and string.

“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 Anzor Kudziyev, 25, a volunteer gravedigger who helped prepare the field for the burials.

Mourners placed flowers and wreaths at the graves, including one where two sisters Alina, 12 and Ira, 13 – were laid to rest together.

Relatives walked toward the cemetery bearing portraits of the dark-haired girls and simple wooden planks – temporary grave markers – bearing their names and dates of birth and death.

The violent end to the school siege left few families untouched in this tight-knit industrial town.

“The grief is for all of our people,” said Kudziyev.

There were conflicting official reports of the death toll, apparently confused in part because of the large number of body fragments collected at the school.

North Ossetia’s health minister Alexander Soplevenko said at least 340 people were dead, while his deputy Taimuraz Revazov said 324 were confirmed dead.

The regional health ministry said 180 people were missing after the three-day hostage crisis, which began when armed attackers raided School No. 1 on the first day of classes, seizing students, teachers and parents who brought their children to opening-day ceremonies.

Russian media speculated that some of the missing could be among the wounded who were brought to various hospitals in North Ossetia, unconscious or in too deep a state of shock – or just too young – to identify themselves.

Also, many of the dead still have not been identified – a process that could take some time, with some bodies charred beyond recognition and others in fragments. The health ministry said 207 of the dead had been identified.

More than 700 people needed medical help after the crisis, and officials said 386 remained in hospital in North Ossetia, including 184 children.

As some residents buried their dead, others were still searching for relatives. Svetlana Tebloyeva returned to the ruined red-brick school building this morning clutching a picture of her 11-year-old son, Zaur. She said she’d looked at hospitals and morgues but had yet to find her son, who she last saw in the school gymnasium before the stand-off ended on Friday.

“I lost my boy,” she cried. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

Questions also remained about the identity of the hostage-takers – Russian officials said several of them were from Arab countries, but little information substantiating that has been released – and about the events leading up to the chaotic climax of the crisis.

Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said today that 32 terrorists had been involved and the bodies of 30 of them had been found, Interfax reported.

Three suspects were detained in Beslan on Saturday, Interfax reported.

Russian officials said the bloodbath began when explosions were apparently set off by the militants – possibly by accident – as emergency workers entered the courtyard to collect the bodies of dead hostages.

They said the militants opened fire on hostages who started to flee in the confusion, prompting security forces and armed locals to return fire and commandos to move in.

Authorities said the blasts tore through the roof of the bomb-wired gymnasium where hundreds of hostages had been herded by their captors, sending wreckage down on victims and killing many of them.

The school seizure came a day after a suicide bombing in Moscow killed nine people and just over a week after two Russian passenger planes crashed following explosions, killing all 90 people aboard – two attacks authorities suspect were linked to Russia’s ongoing war in Chechnya.

A shaken President Vladimir Putin went on national television on Saturday to make a rare 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,” Putin said, blaming the weakness on the economic problems, ethnic discord and borders left in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Putin took a defiant tone, acknowledging corruption in Russian law enforcement agencies but lashing out pointedly at unspecified foreign foes seeking to tear the country apart.

“Some want to cut off a juicy morsel from us, others are helping them. They are helping, believing that Russia, as one of the world’s biggest nuclear powers, is still posing a threat to them,” Putin said.

“Therefore, this threat must be removed.”

Putin promised measures to “strengthen the unity” of Russia and tighten its borders, and demanded “action from our law enforcement organs that would be adequate to the level and scale of the new threats.”

North Ossetian Interior Minister Kazbek Dzantiyev, the region’s top police official, offered his resignation today, an official said, but Channel One television quoted a regional spokesman as saying it had not yet been accepted.

Muradi Nartikoyev, one of the Beslan town elders who was officiating at mourning ceremonies, said the whole regional government should step down. “If they had fulfilled their duty, this would not have been possible,” he said.