Family mourns mother and daughter shown on tape

The accordion Sima Alikova once played lies mute on a bed in her family’s living room, amid a pile of clothes, pictures, toys and even a toothbrush that she and her nine-year-old daughter, Irina, once used.

It’s all the family has left from the two, who were among the hundreds of hostages who died in the siege at School Number One in Beslan – and who Alikova’s co-workers say were seen cowering on the floor of the crowded gymnasium in a videotape apparently taken by their captors on September 1, the first day of the attack.

During the traditional 40-day mourning period, relatives are not supposed to watch television, so Alikova’s family has not seen the footage shown on Russia’s NTV.

But it would be heart-stopping for anyone who lost loved ones in the crisis, after brief moments of hope for a peaceful resolution disappeared in its bloody finale.

When officials won the release of a group of young children and parents on the second day of the standoff, “people, including myself, got a spark of hope that negotiations were going well”, said Alikova’s husband, Vladimir Beryozov, 45.

After the siege ended, he scoured local hospitals for his wife and daughter and scanned journalists’ video footage of parents and children fleeing the gunfire when the siege ended on Friday. The next day, he went to the morgue and found their bodies.

“A man’s heart is not made of stone. I still don’t believe this situation. It’s like a dream,” Beryozov said in the family’s living room where, by Ossetian tradition, the belongings of the dead are laid out on a bed moved there during the mourning period.

Vases of red and white carnations stood next to a picture of Irina with a daffodil in her hair.

“Even today, I look at their graves and photographs and I think they will come back or call me,” he said.

Alikova, 45, worked at the town’s Palace of Culture, where she played accordion and gave lessons, and was remembered as one of Beslan’s best musicians and a favourite of her pupils.

Co-workers there said the two were displayed on the video, and a review of the footage appeared to confirm their presence.

On the tape, a girl resembling Irina sits with her hands clasped in front of her mouth, her mother looking directly into the camera lens.

They sit next to a boy with his hands behind his head, like many of the hostages pictured, and an attacker shown from the waist down dangles a Kalashnikov behind them.

Though anguished, Beryozov said he was relieved to have found his loved ones’ bodies, given the hundreds of relatives still searching for the missing.

The family’s anger was partly directed at regional officials for not taking measures to protect the children and widespread corruption in North Ossetia.

Raisa Beryozova, Irina’s grandmother, held up a white satin dress the girl wore in a school New Year’s production, when she played a princess. Irina had loved the stage and her parents hoped she might have a career in showbusiness.

“She was a very beautiful singer,” Beryozova said.

Irina was attending School Number One for the first time, having transferred there because it was considered the best in the town.

“The organisers of the terrorist acts should stop and think that little children are not guilty of anything,” said Beryozov. “Grown-ups know life, but many of the children who died hadn’t even learned the alphabet. There were even infants who weren’t able to speak at all.”

Beryozov makes his living travelling to Germany and buying used cars to sell, and had recently saved up enough to buy a new home for his family, also including two other sons and a daughter.

He and his wife had lovingly decorated their new house.

“He built a nice house, but now has no one to live there,” his mother said.