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Setting Kerry’s record right—again.

By Fred Kaplan

Posted Thursday, Sept. 2, 2004, at 11:50 AM PT

Half-truths and embellishments are one thing; they’re common at political conventions, vital flourishes for a theatrical air. Lies are another thing, and last night’s Republican convention was soaked in them.

In the case of Sen. Zell Miller’s keynote address, “lies” might be too strong a word. Clearly not a bright man, Miller dutifully recited the talking points that his Republican National Committee handlers had typed up for him, though perhaps in a more hysterical tone than anyone might have anticipated. (His stumbled rantings in the interviews afterward, on CNN and MSNBC, brought to mind the flat-Earthers who used to be guests on The Joe Pyne Show.) Can a puppet tell lies? Perhaps not.

Still, it is worth setting the record straight. The main falsehood, we have gone over before (click here for the details), but it keeps getting repeated, so here we go again: It is the claim that John Kerry, during his 20 years in the Senate, voted to kill the M-1 tank, the Apache helicopter; the F-14, F-16, and F-18 jet fighters; and just about every other weapon system that has kept our nation free and strong.

Here, one more time, is the truth of the matter: Kerry did not vote to kill these weapons, in part because none of these weapons ever came up for a vote, either on the Senate floor or in any of Kerry’s committees.

This myth took hold last February in a press release put out by the RNC. Those who bothered to look up the fine-print footnotes discovered that they referred to votes on two defense appropriations bills, one in 1990, the other in 1995. Kerry voted against both bills, as did 15 other senators, including five Republicans. The RNC took those bills, cherry-picked some of the weapons systems contained therein, and implied that Kerry voted against those weapons. By the same logic, they could have claimed that Kerry voted to disband the entire U.S. armed forces; but that would have raised suspicions and thus compelled more reporters to read the document more closely.

What makes this dishonesty not merely a lie, but a damned lie, is that back when Kerry cast these votes, Dick Cheney—who was the secretary of defense for George W. Bush’s father—was truly slashing the military budget. Here was Secretary Cheney, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 31, 1992:

Overall, since I’ve been Secretary, we will have taken the five-year defense program down by well over $300 billion. That’s the peace dividend. … And now we’re adding to that another $50 billion … of so-called peace dividend.

Cheney then lit into the Democratic-controlled Congress for not cutting weapons systems enough:

Congress has let me cancel a few programs. But you’ve squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don’t fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements. … You’ve directed me to buy more M1s, F14s, and F16s—all great systems … but we have enough of them.

I’m not accusing Cheney of being a girly man on defense. As he notes, the Cold War had just ended; deficits were spiraling; the nation could afford to cut back. But some pro-Kerry equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Zell Miller could make that charge with as much validity as they—and Cheney—make it against Kerry.

In other words, it’s not just that Cheney and those around him are lying; it’s not even just that they know they’re lying; it’s that they know—or at least Cheney knows—that the same lie could be said about him. That’s what makes it a damned lie.

Before moving on to Cheney’s speech, we should pause to note two truly weird passages in Zell’s address. My favorite:

Today, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of a Democrat’s manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.

A “manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief”? Most people call this a “presidential election.” Someone should tell Zell they happen every four years; he can look it up in that same place where he did the research on Kerry’s voting record (”I’ve got more documents,” he said on CNN, waving two pieces of paper that he’d taken from his coat pocket, “than in the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library combined.”)

The other oddball remark: “Nothing makes me madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.” Huge applause line, but is he kidding? The U.S. troops in Iraq are occupiers. Even Bush has said so. If he doesn’t understand this, then he doesn’t understand what our problems are.

Cheney followed Zell, and couldn’t help but begin with … not a lie, but certainly a howler: “People tell me Sen. Edwards got picked for his good looks, his sex appeal, his charm, and his great hair. [Pause] I said, ‘How do you think I got the job?’ “

Funny, apparently self-deprecating line, but does anybody remember how he did get the job? Bush had asked Cheney to conduct the search for a vice presidential candidate, and he came up with himself. He got the job because he picked himself.

Later in the speech, Cheney made this comment: “Four years ago, some said the world had grown calm, and many assumed that the United States was invulnerable to danger. That thought might have been comforting; it was also false.”

Who are these people who thought this? The implication is that it was the Democrats who preceded Bush and Cheney. But it was Bill Clinton’s administration that stopped the millennium attack on LAX. It was Clinton’s national security adviser who told Condoleezza Rice, during the transition period, that she’d be spending more time on al-Qaida that on any other issue. It was Rice who didn’t call the first Cabinet meeting on al-Qaida until just days before Sept. 11. It was Bush’s attorney general who told a Justice Department assistant that he didn’t want to hear anything more about counterterrorism. It was Bush who spent 40 percent of his time out of town in his first eight months of office, while his CIA director and National Security Council terrorism specialists ran around with their “hair on fire,” trying to get higher-ups to heed their warnings of an imminent attack.

“President Bush does not deal in empty threats and halfway measures,” Cheney said. What is an empty threat if not the warnings Bush gave the North Koreans to stop building a nuclear arsenal? What is a halfway measure if not Bush’s decision to topple the Taliban yet leave Afghanistan to the warlords and the poppy farmers; to bust up al-Qaida’s training camps yet fail to capture Osama Bin Laden (whose name has virtually gone unmentioned at this convention); to topple the Iraqi regime yet plan nothing for the aftermath?

“Time and again Sen. Kerry has made the wrong call on national security,” Cheney said. The first example he cited of these wrong calls: “Sen. Kerry began his political career by saying he would like to see our troops deployed ‘only at the directive of the United Nations.’ ” Yes, Kerry did say this—in 1971, to the Harvard Crimson. He has long since recanted it. Is there evidence that George W. Bush said anything remarkable, whether wise or naive, in his 20s?

The second example of Kerry’s wrong calls: “During the 1980s, Sen. Kerry opposed Ronald Reagan’s major defense initiative that brought victory in the Cold War.” We’ve been over this—unless Cheney is talking about the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka the “star wars” missile-defense plan. It may be true that SDI played some role in prompting the Soviet Union’s conciliation, though it was at best a minor role—and wouldn’t have been even that, had it not been for Mikhail Gorbachev. But two more points should be made. First, lots of lawmakers opposed SDI; almost no scientist thought it would work, especially as Reagan conceived it (a shield that would shoot down all nuclear missiles and therefore render nukes “impotent and obsolete”). Second, Kerry voted not to kill SDI, but to limit its funding.

“Even in the post-9/11 period,” Cheney continued, “Sen. Kerry doesn’t appear to understand how the world has changed. He talks about leading a ‘more sensitive war on terror,’ as though al-Qaida will be impressed with our softer side.” A big laugh line, as it was when Cheney first uttered it on Aug. 12 before a group of veterans. But Cheney knows this is nonsense. Here’s the full Kerry quote, from an address to journalists on Aug. 5: “I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side.”

In context, it’s clear that “sensitive,” a word that has several definitions, is not meant as a synonym for “soft.” And Cheney, who is not a stupid man, knows this.

“He declared at the Democratic Convention,” Cheney said of Kerry, “that he will forcefully defend America after we have been attacked. My fellow Americans, we have already been attacked.” Where in Kerry’s speech did he say this? Nowhere.

“Sen. Kerry denounces American action when other countries don’t approve,” Cheney continued, “as if the whole object of our foreign policy were to please a few persistent countries.” No, that’s not it. Kerry thinks that other countries should go along with our actions—that a president must work hard at diplomacy to get them to go along with us—because going it alone often leads to failure. Cheney should ask his old colleague Brent Scowcroft or his old boss W’s father about this. Or he should simply go to Iraq and see what unilateralism has wrought.

Fred Kaplan writes the “War Stories” column for Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2106119/

The Beslan Incident

Relatives attend a religious service near the school

seized by heavily armed masked men and women in the town of Beslan

Ossetians read lists of those hostages who escaped from a seized school

Photos of children who suvived posted outside the hospital to help people locate their loved ones

A relative of a killed hostage, 8-year-old Teimuraz Morgoyev, cries in front of her house

Relatives and neighbors of a killed hostage, 8-year-old Teimuraz Morgoyev, grieve in front of his house

Family members comfort a woman who just identified her relative

as one of the dead hostages at a morgue in the town of Vladikavkaz

Family members comfort a woman who just identified her relatives

as one of the dead hostages, at a morgue in the town of Vladikavkaz

A man comforts his wife who just identified her child

as one of the dead hostages at a morgue in the town of Vladikavkaz

A man comforts his wife who just identified her relative

as one of the dead hostages at a morgue in the town of Vladikavkaz

Family members comfort a woman who just identified her relative

as one of the dead hostages at a morgue in the town of Vladikavkaz

A man comforts a woman who just identified her relative

as one of the dead hostages at a morgue in the town of Vladikavkaz

Fatima, the mother of a killed hostage, 16-year-old Islam Khadikov

A general view shows the school building, which was seized by heavily armed masked men and women

An emergency worker looks through debris and damps down fires at the destroyed sport hall of the school

Emergency workers clean up the destroyed sport hall of the school

A mother and her daughter who were hostages

and escaped from the seized school

A woman helps her freed son as he leaves a hospital

A boy screams as he sits in a car with his relatives after he was released

A boy and a girl sit in a car after they were released

One of 26 babies and mothers released earlier

A father holds his injured son who escaped

A father holds his injured son who escaped

A father holds his injured son who escaped

A mother comforts her son as he await medical attention

A man weeps over the body of a woman killed

Bodies of schoolchildren and hostages killed in a school seizure seen in a hospital morgue

A woman grieves over the body of her child

An injured schoolgirl who escaped from the seized Russian school holds a cross in her hand in a hospital

Eduard Bitsieyev grieves with other relatives over the coffin of his eight-year-old son Zaur at their home

Relatives cry while standing over the body of Zaur Gutnov, an eleven-year-old boy

(Washington Post) Death Toll Rises to 340. By Peter Baker and and Susan B. Glasser. September 4, 2004.

Hundreds of children, their parents and teachers died in the bloody culmination of a 52-hour siege that began when heavily armed Muslim guerrillas stormed their school Wednesday and ended in an hours-long battle with Russian troops Friday.

The battered, burned and scorched survivors of Beslan’s School No. 1, many of them half-naked children, filled the region’s hospitals as troops continued to fight through the afternoon with guerrillas holed up inside the school. Twenty-six of the fighters, described as Chechens, Russians, Ingush and Arabs, were killed, officials said.

Only by late Friday and early Saturday did the scale of the bloodshed in this small town in the region of North Ossetia, west of war-torn Chechnya, become clear. A top Russian official admitted Friday what anguished relatives had been saying for days: There had been more than 1,000 hostages inside the school, the majority of them children.

And on Saturday, officials revised the toll of dead upward, announcing that 340 people had died, including 155 children. That number was expected to rise. Between 500 and 700 injured former hostages were hospitalized Friday, more than 300 of them children, according to varying official accounts. Hundreds were still unaccounted for.

The worst carnage, according to escaped hostages and rescuers, came at the start of the pitched battle just after 1 p.m. Friday, when the guerrillas exploded the bombs they had rigged inside the school’s cavernous gym. The children had been held there without food or medicine, and scores perished when the gym’s roof fell on them.

“The whole floor is covered in bodies,” said Alan Karayev, a local sumo wrestler-turned-volunteer who entered the gym to recover the children’s remains. “There is no ceiling at all. The roof all fell down on the children.”

Their school turned into a battlefield, those hostages who could fled. “Many, many dead. Many dead children,” said a young boy who said he had been blown out of a window by an explosion. He was distraught but apparently uninjured, flanked by his wailing grandmother.

President Vladimir Putin, whose only comment during the siege had been a pledge to “save the life and health of those who became hostages,” remained silent throughout the long afternoon’s battle and into the evening as Russians took stock of the losses. In the middle of the night, he visited Beslan and called the attack “inhuman and cruel.” The whole country, he told local leaders, is “feeling your sorrow, thanking you and praying for you.”

World leaders, including President Bush, offered condolences as they absorbed what Bush called “another grim reminder” of the brutal tactics used by terrorists.

Russian officials said the battle was started by the guerrillas and denied any intention to launch a rescue attempt, a tactic Putin had ordered two years earlier during a Moscow theater siege that resulted in 129 deaths. “We didn’t expect this to happen,” said Aslanbek Aslakhanov, Putin’s top aide for Chechnya, who flew to Beslan on Friday to participate in negotiations that never took place. “What has happened today you know yourselves was started by terrorists.”

The siege of School No. 1, attended by 6- to 16-year-olds, began just after 9 a.m. Wednesday when the guerrillas blasted their way into the building at the end of the opening-day assembly. Though Russian officials never confirmed it publicly, the hostage takers demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya and the release of prisoners taken after a guerrilla raid this summer in the neighboring region of Ingushetia. They also demonstrated their seriousness by mining the school with explosives and threatening to blow it up if Russian forces moved in on them.

For 52 hours, that didn’t happen.

Then came what looked to be progress midday Friday, when the hostage takers agreed to allow Russians to collect several bodies — how many remains unclear — of adults killed in the initial shootout. At 1 p.m., four doctors from the Emergency Situations Ministry arrived to do so.

Instead, a battle erupted.

First, two powerful explosions from inside the building rocked Beslan. Soon, scores of hostages started fleeing, some of them dodging gunfire from the guerrillas. “When the children ran, they began to shoot them in their backs,” said Putin aide Aslakhanov.

“Bandits opened fired on the escaping children and adults,” said Valery Andreyev, regional head of the Federal Security Service. “To save their lives, we retaliated.” In the chaos, some of the hostage takers also tried to escape, officials said.

After initial confusion, the Russian attack began. Helicopters roared overhead, special forces stormed the building, tanks swerved into position. Many of Beslan’s anxious fathers also ran toward the school, some armed, some not — intent only on rescuing their children.

Amidst the shooting, many young hostages, most of them barefoot and almost naked after three days in the withering heat of their gym-turned-prison, ran or limped or were carried to safety. Those still standing gulped bottles of water handed to them by rescue workers. “They’re killing us,” a young girl on a stretcher told a police officer. “They’re exploding everything.”

At the local House of Culture, where parents had held vigil for three long days, women cried and hugged each other as the sounds of the nearby battle sank in. One of them screamed, “Why? Why?” No one had an answer.

By 2:30, a traffic jam of ambulances crowded outside the school, and civilians turned their Zhigulis and Ladas and BMWs into rescue vehicles, as well. There were nowhere near enough. Many of the injured were bloodied and burned and covered in dirt. A man came out carrying a naked girl, her hair matted, her body streaked with shrapnel cuts, her head lolled back. He laid her on the ground and tried to revive her. When she didn’t respond, he started to cry.

The rescue operation was interrupted by a new round of shooting, right near the line of makeshift ambulances. Rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire from automatic rifles sent the volunteers retreating a block farther from the school, and it was there that four children’s corpses soon appeared, laid out under bloodstained white sheets. Several parents came up and looked under the sheets, searching. Then an old woman in a torn flowered dress was brought out on a stretcher, also dead, and rolled onto the grass next to the four children.

“Are there dead children? Where are the dead children?” a woman shouted as she ran up to inspect the bodies. She was looking for her 12-year-old nephew but did not find him there.

Across the railroad tracks that divide Beslan, the scene at the hospital was bedlam. The courtyard was crowded with rank upon rank of stretchers with injured and dazed children. Hundreds of relatives clamored to inspect the handwritten lists of the wounded.

Through it all, the battle with the remaining guerrillas continued. Some apparently remained inside the school well into the evening — eight, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. Others escaped and fought elsewhere in Beslan with Russian troops. As night fell, the school’s gym was still smoldering, its massive windows blown out. The walls inside were pocked with bullet holes and echoed with periodic gunfire and explosions.

Only well after 11 p.m. did Russian officials announce an end to the battle. “Resistance of the terrorists has been fully suppressed,” said a statement from the emergency headquarters.

The Kremlin kept tight controls on information during the crisis, failing to give accurate counts of the hostages, confirm the demands made by the hostage takers or describe the identity of the guerrillas.

When the battle began, Russian networks did not broadcast live for more than half an hour. When they went on the air, they avoided reporting any information except from official sources, which later proved inaccurate. Within three hours, all three Russian networks had dropped the story to return to regularly scheduled entertainment programs.

The school seizure capped an already deadly week of terror across Russia blamed on Chechen separatists, with the nearly downing of two airliners and a suicide bombing at a Moscow subway station that together claimed 100 lives.

New York Times) Russian TV Turns Away From Crisis. By Erin E, Arvedlund. September 4, 2004.

During one of Russia’s most searing hostage crises, one that struck fear across the country and made news around the world, the country’s three largest television networks hesitated, then flailed, and finally turned away.

Even as pandemonium broke out in Beslan, the state-owned or controlled networks avoided the bloodiest images of an assault that left scores dead, many of them schoolchildren. The two largest and most watched -Channel One and Rossiya - offered brief updates, but continued with their regular afternoon programming.

NTV’s news program was on the air as the fighting erupted, and it became clear that the crisis had reached a dramatic climax. One of its correspondents, Ruslan Gusarov, was even on the air when the explosions and gunfire began, but the network quickly cut away and continued with nearly 20 minutes of international news, including a segment on the Republican National Convention in New York.

“I think that the general atmosphere here was the less news you have the better it is,” said Savik Schuster, the host of NTV’s political talk show “Svoboda Slova,” or “Free Speech,” until it was canceled in July. “And I think it is a mistake.”

Ever since he took office, President Vladimir V. Putin has exerted greater control over Russian television networks, orchestrating the ouster of political opponents who controlled them and tightening restrictions on what the main networks broadcast. Critics have long complained that the Kremlin’s control has limited what Russians see and hear, and that was eminently clear on Friday.

Mr. Putin was fiercely critical of the coverage of the last hostage crisis, the siege of a theater in Moscow in 2002. Mr. Putin did not make a statement on Friday, and without his words, which usually feature prominently in every newscast, coverage seemed to lose direction.

At 3:30 p.m., as the fighting ground on and bloodied children emerged, shattered and stunned, Channel One and Rossiya turned away from the reports of the hostage scene and went back to regularly scheduled entertainment programming, showing feature films and afternoon dramas like “Taxist,” a serial about taxi drivers.

For those with satellite or cable service, the only real - and raw - sources of news were CNN and the BBC, which continued broadcasting jarring live images from a nearby rooftop all afternoon.

Only late Friday did the main networks show more of the most shocking images - an overflow of the dead at the Beslan morgue, parents filing past stretcher after stretcher in search of their children, wailing grief - that had already beamed around the world for hours.

(Washington Post) ‘All of a Sudden, the Big Bomb Blew Up’. By Peter Baker. September 4, 2004.

When “the storm” finally came, as the adults feared it would, the bullets started flying, the bombs were exploding and most of the children didn’t know what to do.

Hundreds of hostages, sweaty, hungry and scared, had been packed into a school gymnasium for three days. They had been told they would die if soldiers tried to rescue them. And suddenly a full-scale war erupted around them — the soldiers were coming.

Sosik Parastayev, who had just begun the fourth grade, noticed a man in uniform at the gym window, beckoning him to jump out. Sosik and his brother Atik, a year younger, scampered to the window along with their mother, Alyona Kokoyeva, who had been caught with them in the three-day siege of School No. 1. But as she tried to clear the broken glass from the window so the boys could leap out, Sosik said, a bullet sliced through the air and ripped into her body.

“I was nearly shot,” too, Sosik said. “I jumped out the window. . . . Some soldiers grabbed me as soon as I jumped out. Everyone wet their pants.”

His mother survived, but he lost contact with his younger brother.

The army commando attack on the captured school in this town in southern Russia dragged on for hours after the assault Friday. But for the vast majority of the children held prisoner by guerrillas, “the storm,” as the survivors described the military onslaught, took place in a few chaotic and decisive minutes. Those who made it out of the gym right away were survivors. Those who did not mostly died.

Explosives that the guerrillas had wired around the gym blew up in a devastating cascade shortly after the first shots were fired, bringing the ceiling down on top of hundreds of school children who never had a chance.

Hours later, the demolished gym still smoldered, its carcass blackened and crumbled. By nightfall, most of the crushed bodies of students remained pinned under the rubble, while soldiers searched for lingering guerrillas and detonated the remaining booby trap bombs.

For those who survived, there were broken bones, charred skin, mangled flesh and memories that don’t fade fast for young children. The words they spoke in the hours afterward seemed disconnected from their innocent faces, as they summoned forth images of mayhem and pandemonium.

“When they were storming, there was a lot of shooting,” said Aslan Isayev, dirty and scratched and seemingly hardened to the violence, even though he was 9 years old. “Our soldiers came in and killed at least one of them, and maybe more,” he said, referring to the guerrillas.

“I saw the bullets flying right at us from the second floor and the first floor,” offered Arkady Zangiyev, also 9. “I fell on the ground. They were shooting. Then I started running. One guy from our class had a problem with his foot, and I helped him run. I managed to run to the back exit, and there was one of our policemen there. He grabbed a wounded boy and carried him.”

The survivors were transported in ambulances and by volunteers in private cars to the Beslan hospital, which was so overcrowded it set up giant tents to handle overflow patients and left others to lie on stretchers outside on the grass. Arkady, wandered around the grass still dressed in his first-day-of-school gray pinstriped vest and pants, though he had long since discarded the shirt and jacket.

He and his classmates at School No. 1 had arrived on Wednesday morning for the opening of a new year, a festive day in the Russian calendar. Chechens and other guerrillas charged into the school at 9 a.m., armed with rocket launchers and explosive belts, showing a brutal willingness to use children to advance their the cause.

“The terrorists were hiding behind trees,” Arkady remembered. “They jumped out and started shooting in the air. Some boys fell down in the street.”

Several men were killed in the first onslaught Wednesday morning, among them security guards, neighbors and fathers who happened to be at the school for the opening. Their bodies were left where they fell, baking in the late summer heat, while the guerrillas turned the school into a fortress. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Russian troops encircled the building.

Inside, the students and their mothers were herded into the gym, and all the men were taken elsewhere. Some of the children spoke about rumors that they heard that the men had been killed — shot at point-blank range, according to some versions, or blown up by female suicide bombers, according to others.

The guerrillas began wiring the gym for a showdown. They placed a box of explosives at the center of the room, connected to a pedal that one of the militants held down with a foot. If he lifted his foot, the children were told, the bomb would go off. After that, according to the surviving children, the guerrillas set another 16 to 18 smaller, cylindrical bombs around the room, some on windowsills, one in a basketball net.

The children said the guerrillas terrorized them but did not hurt them physically. When some of the children cried too loudly, the guerrillas fired their weapons into the air or out a window to silence them. “They intimidated us,” Sosik said. “They pointed their guns at us. But they didn’t beat us.”

But survivors said the guerrillas were harsh with some adult hostages. Chermen Bugulov, 8, said one man was killed the first day of the siege. “One guy was screaming, and they shot him in the stomach,” Chermen said. “His insides fell out. Then they pulled him away and got covered in his blood.”

Conditions in the gym grew increasingly grim. On the first day, the children were allowed to drink tap water and some were given chocolate bars from the school supply.

But the guerrillas refused government offers to bring in food, and the candy bars were gone by the second day. On the third day, water was also running short. The children were allowed a sip at a time when they went to the bathroom, and some resorted to drinking urine.

“This morning we didn’t get anything to eat,” Arkady said. “We got piss instead of water.”

Most of the children had stripped off as much clothing as they could, often down to underwear for the boys, as they tried to survive the stultifying heat. Outside, the temperature reached a high of 86 degrees, but the conditions inside grew ever hotter and stuffier.

Arkady was so drained by the heat that he was falling asleep Friday afternoon when the commando raid began. “I lay down ready to sleep a bit,” he said, “and then all of a sudden the big bomb blew up.”

The children described the main explosion in conflicting ways. Aslan said the guerrilla with his foot on the pedal attempted to flee the shooting. “He let go of the pedal and tried to run away, but it blew up and killed him,” the boy said.

Chermen, however, said the bomb was set off by the commandos’ gunfire. “Our guys accidentally hit the bomb, and it exploded,” he said, still having trouble hearing after the blast. “The other bombs detonated at the same time. In some places the ceiling collapsed. It fell down on people.”

Those nearest the windows and walls had the best chance of surviving. “Me and my mom were blown up against the wall, and something heavy fell on my head,” Aslan said.

Arkady ran to a window. “The bomb blew up, and they blew out the windows, and everyone started jumping out,” he said. “I wanted to run with my grandmother, but the old people couldn’t run as fast as we could.” In the space of a few minutes, his youth seemed to have ended. “I saw two dead people. One was shot in the chin.”

Sosik could see that neither of those people was his mother. He saw that she had been shot, but he jumped out the window, not knowing what would happen to her.

His mother, it turned out, was taken to the hospital. But Sosik’s brother, Atik, did not follow him out the window. As of late Friday afternoon, Atik had not been found.

(New York Times) 52 Hours of Horror and Death for Captives at Russian School. By C.J. Chivers. September 5, 2004.

Long before the first bombs exploded in Middle School No. 1, marking the beginning of a ferocious battle that left hundreds of schoolchildren and their parents and teachers dead, the hostages had descended to near despair.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” said one survivor, Emma Gagiyeva, 13, who sat numbly on a couch on Saturday, as the death toll climbed relentlessly, to 330, with many children still missing. “Then they started to shoot the windows, and glass fell on the people. They were shooting above our heads and they killed a few people, and I knew it was real.”

She and other survivors and their families began to give a coherent account of the 52 hours of killings and captivity at the hands of masked gunmen that erupted in a catastrophic chain of events on Friday, when two large explosions set off battles between the captors and Russian forces.

At least 1,200 people had been crammed into the school gymnasium, with no food and little water, and with a frightening network of bombs laced overhead.

Temperatures had become stifling, survivors and their families said Saturday, and some students were so hungry they had taken to eating the wilted bouquets they had carried to school. One boy said he was hoping for a bomb to go off, so the crisis might end. The terrorists teased their child captives, and shot at least one man to demonstrate the penalty for breaking their rules.

Even as Beslan was consumed by agonizing worry and grief, interviews with the survivors told of a moment when the first day of school became the opening of an ordeal.

The day began with an assembly in the schoolyard, with children streaming in with parents and brothers and sisters to open the school year. It was like years past, until the moment when the newly arriving first graders were to be introduced. It had always been a tender moment in years past. This year, people heard shouts, and saw something alarming: a line of masked gunmen advancing through the yard.

“The terrorists ran in yelling, ‘Allahu Akhbar,’ ” said Asamaz Bekoyev, 11, who escaped with his mother and brother and lay in his bed Saturday at his grandmother’s house, being treated for cuts and minor burns.

A brief gun battle ensued, as the terrorists overwhelmed the few police officers at the ceremony, who had been caught unaware.

With shouts and threats, the entire school assembly was herded into the gymnasium and told to sit down on the floor. The terrorists knew how to force the group to submit. The captives would soon learn that being told to sit meant just that.

Asamaz’s older brother, Azamat, 14, said one of the hostages, an Ossetian man, tried to stand but as he rose to his feet a terrorist shot him in the forehead. The man fell straight to the floor, dead. “I saw this with my eyes,” the boy said.

Another man tried to run out the back door to freedom, but a terrorist followed him, calmly sighted him through the rifle and shot him in the back. The man’s body was then dragged through the gymnasium by the feet, leaving a long trail of blood.

The cruel rules of the siege were now established: Obey or die.

Details followed: The hostages were allowed to speak only in Russian, so the captors could understand every word. They were told that they must remain in their places. They were told to hand in their cellphones.

“They said, ‘If we hear somebody’s telephone ringing, 20 people around you will be killed,’” said Serafima Bekoyeva, 44, the mother of the two boys.

An order of business was soon under way. As hundreds of students huddled together, the terrorists gathered about 10 of the adult male hostages and enlisted them to help place bombs throughout the gym.

First they produced their makeshift bombs. Some were large plastic beer bottles packed with explosives, others rectangular, bricklike packets, wrapped tightly in brown tape, the survivors said.

The captors strung rope between the two basketball rims, and hung a line of these explosives overhead. The basketball nets themselves were tied shut, forming mesh baskets, into which more bombs were placed. Other bombs were arrayed along the floor and walls; the hostages estimated 20 in all, strung together with remarkable speed and skill.

The entire assembly was connected by blue and red wires, and at all times one of the terrorists held a small black box with which the bombs could be made to explode. “They told us that one press of a button was enough to detonate everything,” Ms. Bekoyeva said.

Another group of hostages, about 10 or 15 boys, were ordered into the adjacent school building, where they served as a labor pool, stacking desks against doors and windows as a barricade for their captors’ protection from Russian gunfire or advance.

Through the gymnasium drifted two female suicide bombers, wearing running shoes and black clothes. Black scarves obscured their faces, leaving only a slit for their eyes. Each had an explosive belt. Each was armed the same way: in one hand, a button for self-detonation, and in the other, a pistol.

The terrifying waiting began. Sometimes, the hostages said, they were taunted by both word and deed.

On the first day, they were given buckets of water and cups, but not enough, and people grew parched with thirst. The captors took clothes, soaked them in water and threw them to the crowd, who clutched them and wrung them above their open mouths, drinking the drops.

Emma said she was caring for Regina Sonakoyeva, a 3-year-old girl who kept crying out in thirst. “I held her and kept telling her, ‘They will bring some, they will bring some,’ ” Emma said.

But their cage grew hotter.

One woman asked for water, the hostages said, and a terrorist held a pistol to her head, which she pushed away in indignation. “I cannot even ask for water?” she said. The terrorists then posted one of the women with a suicide bomb belt beside her.

“They said, ‘If she says anything more, kill her,’ ” Azamat said. The woman sat quietly after that.

The rules became crueler still. Ms. Bekoyeva and her sons, and three other survivors, said that after the terrorists grew irritated by the children’s continued crying, they pulled two men from the crowd, ordered them to hold their hands behind their heads, and addressed the room.

“They said, ‘If you don’t stop this noise, we will kill them,’ ” Emma said.

(One of the men was Batras Tuganov, Emma’s uncle, who in the end was not shot because of the noise level, but who has not been found after the battle, and is feared dead.)

People did whatever they could to take care of themselves, shedding clothes to cool down, and tearing apart school textbooks to use as fans. “For two days I was continually waving my arm to fan my children,” Ms. Bekoyeva said. “They kept asking for more.”

The terrorists also gradually restricted access to the bathroom, first allowing five hostages at a time to use the toilets, then three. With little chance for their turn, the younger children could not hold back and relieved themselves in the crowd’s midst. “We had them urinate into bundles of cloth,” Emma said.

The air grew steaming hot and foul-smelling with worry, urine and sweat. Eventually the terrorists shot out the top windows, the survivors said, so that a bit of air could move through the enclosed space.

The survivors also noted that their captors seemed to be students of past failures: they carried gas masks, apparently having learned from the fate of the terrorists who seized a theater in Moscow in 2002, and succumbed to a gas attack.

Sometimes the captors simply fired into the gym’s ceiling.

Azamat recalled one terrorist, a man with a short beard whom the others called Ali, saying, “Have you ever seen such kind terrorists?”

Azamat and Emma said that a woman offered the hostages all of the town’s money, but one of their captors said, “We don’t need money. We have come here to die.”

As the interactions with their captors deepened, the hostages began to develop a sense of who held their fates. They estimated the terrorists number at 30. With the temperature rising, many of the gunmen removed their masks, displaying thick beards. They spoke Russian and a language the Ossetians said they did not understand, but was probably Chechen.

The hostages said they were unable to tell whether Arabs were among their captors, as the Russian government has asserted, without providing evidence as yet.

One hostage taker spoke of normal life, even as his own fate seemed sealed. “He said he himself had a wife and five children at home,” Emma said.

The hostages heard through rumors shared quietly from captive to captive that at least one of the women with the bomb belts detonated herself in the school library on Wednesday.

“After the first day, we did not see the women again,” Ms. Bekoyeva said.

The terrorists also spoke of politics, saying that they wanted the release of six Ingush who had been detained after an insurgent raid in June left nearly 100 dead, and that they wanted to extend the war between Russia and its breakaway republic of Chechnya.

They also showed strange signs of fastidiousness, considering their evident determination to die. Several terrorists, three hostages said, carried toothbrushes, razors and toothpaste, tucked beside their ammunition on their camouflage-clad chests.

By late Friday morning, as the temperature soared anew in the crowded gymnasium, the hostages were becoming weaker by the hour. “People were almost losing consciousness,” Azamat said. “We had not eaten or had water in almost three days.”

Another boy who survived, Atsomaz Ktsoyev, 14, said the hostages were so hungry they ate the floral bouquets they had brought to school for the first day of class. “I never thought in my life I’d be eating flowers,” he said.

He added, “It didn’t help.”

Then came the end, at shortly after 1 p.m. Five or so terrorists had checked on the explosives, the survivors said, and a few minutes later, the hall shook from an unexpected blast.

The first bomb blew out the windows and filled the room with smoke and falling bits of plaster. Some hostages near the broken frames began to pour through them. Dashes for freedom began.

Others who survived dived for shelter, pressing flat. Emma said Azamat fell atop her and his younger brother, trying to cover their bodies and hold them to the gymnasium’s floor. “He said to me, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ ” she said.

Then came the second blast. Their small group rose through the acrid smell of the detonated explosives, and scrambled out the window, too.

Life and death seemed to have been left to the whims of the seating arrangement. In the densely packed crowd, those nearest the bombs absorbed much of the shrapnel and force, and were killed.

Those away from them, and near the now vanished windows, had a chance.

Emma said she ran wildly, as the terrorists opened fire. A boy who was running with his sister was struck, and the girl stopped to help him. Emma continued on. “I didn’t see what happened to them,” she said.

Ms. Bekoyeva said she handed six or seven children out the window, as older children scrambled past.

Then she went out herself.

She and her two sons ran to a shed, took shelter in it as the bullets flew by, and then Azamat punched out the back window, and they scrambled through it. After another sprint they came to the Russian police officers and soldiers. Most of them realized they were safe, but all did not. Seeing the police, Emma was confused.

“I got scared and thought they were other terrorists,’ she said. “But one embraced me and said, ‘Do not be afraid.’ “

Asamaz stopped when he reached a covered place near the police, and as the battle raged only a few yards behind them, he snatched fistfuls of grapes from the trellises, and, handing them out to the children with him - the first food they had had in more than two days.

Now lying in bed, he winced as his aunt Zalina Basiyeva put a traditional medicine on his burns.

Outside their window, people clustered in the courtyard, waiting for news. Everything the people of Beslan thought they knew about living, his aunt said, had changed. She rubbed bits of the filament of eggshell onto the boy’s blisters and burns, and said the lesson was indelible: “We never knew how happy we were.”

(Christian Science Monitor) Russian school siege: A survivor’s tale. By Scott Peterson. September 5, 2004.

The last time Alla Gadiyeva saw her first-grade son and mother – at the violent climax today of Russia’s 53-hour hostage saga – she was helping them to escape. She pushed them out of a school window with other hostages, and fell back exhausted.

“Then, I was praying,” says the young mother, recounting the ordeal from a stretcher outside the city hospital, after her own rescue several hours later. “We were all praying.”

Authorities, survivors, and reporters on the scene are still piecing together the chaotic events. North Ossetia officials said that at least 200 people died and up to 700 were injured among more than 1,000 children and adults held captive by Chechen separatists.

The most common version of events is that the hostage-takers opened fire on a vehicle sent in to retrieve bodies of those killed at the start of the seizure of Beslan’s Middle School No. 1, in southern Russia. Russian authorities said they were forced to storm the building at that point. Almost immediately, says Mrs. Gadiyeva and others, at least one group of children managed to escape while being shot at by their captors.

Russian forces battled the hostage-takers for hours as explosions and grenades rocked the city. Russian troops – with special forces spearheading the storming – killed 27 hostage-takers and captured three alive, officials told the Interfax news agency.

The end of the siege Friday brought tears of joyful reunion for those with children who were brought out alive. For some others, who did not find their family members’ names on the survivor lists, it elicited high-pitched wails of sorrow.

“My niece is missing - she’s not on any of the [survivor] lists,” said one woman, sitting alone on a small stump under a cluster of trees, shoes off and head buried in her hands. When the Russian raid began today, said the woman, “we were frightened. Of course we didn’t want [a raid]. Everyone knew how that would end.”

In the hours after the ordeal, the hostages seemed more drained than emotional – depleted by three days without any food or water. The heat in the gymnasium, where most of them were held, caused many to strip to their underwear. Several of the hostages said that they were driven by their thirst to drink their ownb urine. Explosives were laid and hung everywhere.

By this afternoon, Gadiyeva said they were growing desperate. Children fell unconscious, and there was not a quiver of response or sympathy from their captors, she said.

She heard the militants speaking with Chechen, Ingush, and Ossetian accents.

Russian officials said later that they had killed as many as 10 Arabs in the raid. But Gadiyeva says, at least where she was, she heard no Arab accents and saw no Arab-looking men or women. Two of the women hostage-takers wore belts of explosives.

Gadiyeva says that she had grown weak, and her own will to live was fading.

“If we weren’t taken out, we would have committed suicide. Without water, without air, people were losing their senses,” she says, resting on a stretcher under trees outside the hospital. She was dressed in blue jeans. Her shirt was dabbed with small blood smears. “The only thing I wished was that I would die quickly.”

Their captors left no doubt about the outcome, if their demands were not met for Russian forces to withdraw from Chechnya, and release captured comrades in neighboring Ingushetia.

“[The Russians] killed our children, so we have nothing left to lose,” Gadiyeva recalls the hostage-takers saying. “We will either win, or you will die here,” they told her.

When the hostage-takers seized the school, she says that they told everyone to hand over their mobile phones, and threatened to kill 20 people if someone tried to hide a phone.

Two men were killed on the first day. “They were shot. Everyone saw them,” recalls Gadiyeva. “Then [the gunmen] said: ‘If any of your children make a sound, we will kill another.’

Gadiyeva says that given the ruthlessness of the hostage-takers, and the growing exhaustion of the captives, there was little choice but for Russian forces to act.

“If [Russian soldiers] didn’t [storm] the building, in a few hours time, people were already at the stage of unconsciousness and would have died anyway,” she says.

With so many children’s lives on the line, on Thursday, Russian officials expressed their intention of reaching a negotiated settlement. On Thursday, they negotiated the release of 26 hostages. Officials say they were forced to act, once the firefight began. Two explosions marked the start of Friday’s violent saga.

“There were explosions, and [the militants] started killing everyone,” says Valery Gafurova, a girl with long black hair on a nearby hospital stretcher. She had been evacuated in a red van, crammed with other children and screaming adults.

Lending credence to the unexpected nature of the Russian assault, was the apparent improvised response. Russian medics quickly lined up ambulances to take away the wounded. Groups of heavily armed special forces – sweating beneath bulletproof vests – advanced and retreated. Between barrages of grenade explosions and intense gunfire, one blue-uniformed soldier ran down the street with a collection bag in his hand, yelling: “Has anyone got any bullets? We are short of ammo!”

At one point, Russian police officers cleared the road, and shouted out that one group of rebels had escaped. “If you see a woman in white, don’t go near her!” they warned. Some female Muslim suicide bombers have been known to wear white to signify their preparation for death.

To avoid that end for her family, when the shooting started, Gadiyeva had forced her son, Zaur, and her mother through a school window. Not long after, Russian troops blew a hole in the side of the building, and hostages came streaming out.

At one point, some 60 exhausted and frightened children escaped to the garden gate of Vera Aguzarova, a pensioner in her 70s.

“I heard them crying. They didn’t know what to do,” recalls Mrs. Aguzarova, pointing to a lush patch of pear trees and grapevines, a couple blocks from the brick school. “I opened the gate and told them to come in and hide. There was a sniper and he was shooting at them.”

She points to the bloody bare footprints tracing a path from her kitchen floor to the bathroom, where they poured water down their parched throats from one of the four faucets there. She says they fought for water, leaving their handprints on the white tiles and sinks.

“I’m sure those [hostage-takers] are [Osama] bin Laden’s children, [but] who will pay for the lost blood of these children?” asks Aguzarova, clutching an armful of stained clothes left behind. She holds up a small chocolate bar, left behind by a girl who had wounds on both legs.

“She had been saving this for three days,” says Aguzarova, impressed by her determination and perseverance. “She said, ‘Aunty, help me. I’m dying,’before she was later taken to the hospital. With some conviction, Aguzarova, says that she will do what she can to help this girl recover: “I’m going to find her. I’ll find her.”

Back in the gymnasium, Gadiyeva huddled with her hands around her head as gunfire and explosions went off around her. Then she heard a voice; it was a Russian soldier, saying, “You’re home. It’s over.”

She says now, “It was like a dream. I still haven’t come to my senses yet,” says the young woman, rising slowly with obvious pain. She wants to check the survivor lists taped on the hospital walls.

“I’ve got to find my boy and my mother. I was told they are alive,” she says, with a new determination. “When we get out of here, we won’t go directly home. We’ll buy ten liters of Coca-Cola and ice cream.”

(Telegraph) One little boy was shouting: ‘Mama.’ She couldn’t hear him. She was dead. By Olga Craig. September 5, 2004.

Crouched on the gymnasium floor, with his chin crushed down into his chest, 11-year-old Alan Tsgoeva could see from the corner of his eye the masked man’s foot hovering above a pedal on the ground a few inches away.

“It was stifling. I couldn’t breathe. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth, I was so thirsty,” Alan said. “The woman next to me kept saying, ‘That pedal - it will detonate a bomb if he stamps on it.’ She whispered prayers. I couldn’t take my eyes off his foot. I kept thinking, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it. Don’t blow me to bits.’ I thought of my mama; my sister.

“There was no room to move. Everyone was sweating and stinking. Women and babies were crying and wailing. Every time they cried, the men would fire their guns and shout. I clamped my hands over my ears.”

Despite his prayers, at 9.05 British time on Friday morning, an explosion did rip through the sports hall of School Number 1. Alan, stumbling and blood-stained, scrambled towards one of the shattered windows. “I could barely see. There was screaming and smoke. Some people were crushed under bricks. There were heads sticking out from under blocks - just heads.”

Wearing only underpants and a pair of torn sandals, he tried to jump up, clutching at the shards of glass that splintered beneath his grasp and slashed his hands.

“A heavy chair fell on my leg and I was pushed down,” he said. “There were people scrabbling all around me. Then a policeman stretched out his arms to me and pulled me up. He carried me across the room and jumped out of the window. He ran and ran. My legs were dangling. I could see bodies and blood - blood everywhere; twisted bodies, lying on the ground. He saved me.”

Yesterday, Alan, at home now with his parents, could only gaze listlessly at the family’s battered television set, watching again and again the footage of the 53 hours in which his innocence died - and in the one place where he should have been most safe: at school.

He was one of the lucky ones who survived when one of the scores of bombs that the Chechen terrorists had taped to the gymnasium exploded. Seconds later, another militant, a woman, detonated the bomb belt strapped to her waist. In the chaos that followed, the surviving terrorists fired wildly at the hostages who tried to flee.

Irina Keraoyev, 12, had been at the front of the gymnasium, nearest the door, when the blast came. “I was kneeling, in just my knickers and vest. Out in the corridor I could hear one of the men shouting. It was in Chechen. A young child, just a toddler, was crying. His mother was inside and crying out her son’s name. But they wouldn’t let her come out to him. The man was hysterical. He shouted to stop crying or he would shoot. I could hear him slapping the child. Just the sound - I couldn’t see.”

Irina, one of the farthest from the blast, staggered outside after the explosion. “My legs were numb. I wanted to run, but they wouldn’t work. I was trying to run, to walk, but I just couldn’t do it.

“There was a woman, maybe in her forties, beside me. She tried to drag me with her. Then she fell. I could hear the gunfire roaring. I didn’t know what was happening, but now I know the men were firing at us, to stop us escaping. The back of the woman’s head was all blood. I pulled at her hand, but it just flopped down again. My left leg was burnt and blistered, but I couldn’t feel a thing.”

Irina began to crawl towards safety, then a soldier lifted her up and carried her. She was among those who had got out of the school first, and she was placed on a stretcher and put into an ambulance.

“More and more stretchers were loaded. Then they took them out so that they could get more people in. Some were screaming, calling for their mamas. Some just lay there. I think the man beside me was dead. Everyone stank. Half were naked, but nobody cared.”

The horrific ordeal had begun on Wednesday morning as they took part in the traditional “back to school” celebrations outside the sprawling, red-brick building on the outskirts of Beslan, in North Ossetia, close to the Chechen border.

Rosa Dudiyea, a teacher, saw an army lorry drive in through the gates full of what she thought were Russian soldiers - about 40 in all. “They wore army outfits and had beards,” she said. “Then we saw the masks. They tried to pretend they were Russian and to lure the children inside with chocolate bars.

“No one knew what was happening. Suddenly they started to fire. Everyone was running. We thought we were running to safety in the school.”

Olga, another teacher, who was freed with her three-year-old on the second day of the siege but was forced to leave her two older children behind, said there were at least 1,500 people there. Most were children.

“We had begun to form a line in the school yard to listen to the headmistress’s speech when the shooting started,” she recalled.

“There were streamers and balloons. It is the highlight of the school calendar - each year the oldest boy in the school carries the youngest girl, on his back, around the yard. A little blonde girl was just clambering up onto the bigger boy’s back when the shots sounded. Some of the little children squealed and shouted, ‘The balloons have burst!’

“Then we saw the gunmen,” Olga continued.

“We were herded into the sports hall. The doors were locked. Then people in masks broke the windows and doors and leapt in. They ordered us to sit down and then they began to mine the room.

“Two large explosive devices were put in the basketball nets. Then they laid smaller devices on the floor and attached more to the walls. They booby-trapped the whole room in less than 10 minutes. Some hung from the ceiling. The biggest was in the centre of the floor. The next biggest seemed to have a pedal. A man stood with his foot above it. Beside him were two women with explosives tied to their middles.”

The hostages were squashed together - so many that some were forced to lie on top of each other.

Within an hour, the hall became stiflingly hot. “We all had to strip off. No one had modesty,” said Atsamas Ketsoyev, 14. “When the babies cried, the men got angry and would fire their guns. The little ones were terrified. They kept wanting to go to the toilet.

“On the first day, the terrorists brought some buckets of water, but then nothing. Nothing to eat or drink. They moved the mothers and small babies upstairs because they said the crying irritated them.

“There were three or four gunmen in the hall and three at each door. But when I was allowed to go to the toilet I saw that there were lots more in the corridors. Some were in groups; some lay on the ground. They were all armed and masked.

“One child would not stop crying, and a man said he would shoot it. He said, ‘If this noise doesn’t stop, I’ll shoot you.’ ” The terrorists rarely spoke, saying only that they wanted Russia out of their country.

Tanya, 14, was slapped across the face when she tried to drink from a tap in the lavatories.

“The man went crazy, he hit me and tugged the top off the tap so I couldn’t drink any more. All around me, people were taking off clothes, peeing on them and trying to suck off the urine. Little children were tearing off the leaves of plants and eating them - they were so hungry.

“One little boy, about seven, stood naked with urine running down his leg. He was stuffing rose petals into his bleeding mouth from one of the bouquets the children had brought for the teachers. He was shouting, ‘Mama!’ She couldn’t hear him. She was dead.”

One 15-year-old boy spoke of how the older boys and men were separated and given “chores”. “We had to gather the bodies of those who had died when they took the school and throw them out of the windows. Then they wanted us to board them up.

“I carried the body of a little girl and threw it out of the window,” he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. As he threw her, he decided to try to escape, and jumped out of the window, too. “I knew it might be my one chance.

“When I fell, I saw her dead body lying there, so I took off my T-shirt and covered her face. I smashed my leg as I fell and I knew it was broken so I crawled, dragging it behind. I squeezed myself behind a wall, with the bodies. And I just lay there and waited. I know I dozed although my leg was sore.”

Inside the gymnasium, the hostage-takers, their patience wearing thin by late afternoon, began punching their hostages and butting them with rifles.

Volodia, 16, who had taken her younger brother to school that morning, said that one remained aloof. “He sat reading the Koran. He never lifted his head. I whispered to him, ‘Would we be killed?’ But he just said he had nothing to do with it.

“Some people said that the older girls who were dragged into another room were being raped. We could hear cries, but then, so many were screaming and crying, that it was impossible to know.”

Their ordeal dragged into a third day and then reached its climax.

As the first bomb exploded and the gymnasium ceiling caved in, the terrorists lost control of the situation.

Diana Gadzhinova, 14, and her sister, Alina, 12, had been lying on the floor at the time.

“There was a massive explosion in the yard,” said Diana. “Then there was shooting. [My sister and I] stayed where we were, lying on the floor. But, suddenly, there was another explosion above us and part of the ceiling fell in. People were screaming. There was panic. They were running everywhere. No one knew what was happening.

“I looked up and saw some children lying on the floor, covered in blood and not moving. There was a dead woman lying beside me. Torn-off arms and legs were lying everywhere. There were bombs.

(Scotsman) Stunned aftermath of siege bloodbath. By Kate Foster and Murdo MacLeod. September 5, 2004.

BY LAST night Zalina Tsabolova had given up hope. With no news after a day of searching she went home, sat out on her balcony and resigned herself to the fact she will not see her 10-year-old son Marat alive again.

Below her, hundreds of other parents were still scouring hospitals desperate for news of their children. But Tsabolova knows in her heart her son is dead.

“Marat used to daydream,” she said. “He used to dream of becoming president. We had such a clever little boy, he played chess so well. Why was he killed by the terrorists? What on earth kind of a victory is this for them and their cause? ”

Crowds of bewildered relatives were yesterday at hospitals and morgues seeking news of their loved ones caught up in the Russian school siege, as the shock of Friday’s bloodbath turned to despair.

Outside overflowing hospitals, pale and exhausted relatives gathered looking for children, parents and teachers caught up in the siege, searching lists of the survivors inside.

Many still did not know whether their children were dead or alive as the overstretched staff were too busy performing emergency surgery on casualties to issue the names of all those being treated.

The main doors of one hospital were plastered with the names of some victims and 15 colour photographs of wounded children in hospital beds, too young to explain who they were.

Instead, they appeared on the lists with brief descriptions, such as “unconscious girl” and “boy who cannot speak”.

At the main hospital in the nearby city of Vladikavkaz, one of several dealing with gunshot wounds and burns among victims, the head doctor, Uruzmag Dzhanyev, said 250 children were being treated.

“Many children [survivors] will be invalids. Some do not have eyes,” he said.

Six badly wounded children, including a two-year-old, were flown to Moscow for treatment, but for the others the rudimentary local facilities were the only aid on offer for their wounds.

And for those relatives with no news, the next port of call was the morgue where they queued to see whether their loved ones lay amid the lines of bodies outside. Dozens of stretchers were placed on the ground with corpses on them, their skin the colour of powdered milk.

Most were children or women, naked bodies covered with black tarpaulin or plastic sheets.

Relatives accompanied by nurses picked their way past rows of stretchers, holding handkerchiefs or gauze masks to their faces against the stench.

Hardly a family in the small Russian town of Beslan has been left untouched by Friday’s slaughter.

Grief, anger and uncertainty mingled in the town of 30,000 after the bloodiest hostage crisis in decades ended on Friday with half-naked and wounded children dodging bullets as they fled and security forces stormed the school building.

There were tears of relief yesterday as some parents were reunited with children who had been held hostage for 52 hours. While some mothers who had kept a vigil outside the school since the crisis broke out on Wednesday clasped their young children and wept, others held only photographs of their loved ones as they searched for them amid the dead and the injured.

One man showed hospital nurses a photograph of a young boy dressed in a suit. Another elderly man held a photograph of his grown-up daughter.

Zelim Dzeliyev held up photos of his neighbour’s children, four girls, all lost. His friend Albert, also missing, was pictured on holiday with his wife on Spain’s Costa del Sol.

“My daughter escaped but my son, no one knows what happened to him. We have checked the hospitals, we have asked everyone, but we have no news,” said one woman. “The bodies must be so burnt that we may never recognise them.”

With hundreds still being treated for burns and gunshot wounds, anxious relatives also milled at the town’s cinema, where officials were due to provide details of the dead and injured.

One man, Alan, looking for news of his sister, said: “Everyone in this town has lost someone. What they say on television is a lie. There could be 600 dead.”

His eyes were red from lack of sleep and he blinked repeatedly to stop tears as he walked through the crowds.

Ruslan, a young man, was searching for his wife: “I’ve been searching all day and I can’t find her. Where are our people? No one tells us anything. No one is protecting us,” he said.

“We run here, we run there, like we’re out of our minds, trying to find out anything we can about them,” said Tsiada Biazrova, 47, whose neighbours’ children had yet to be found.

Zafira Kuduzeba, a grandmother, was yesterday searching for three members of her family, her daughters Larissa and Madina, and her six-year old grandson, Zaurdek.

She wept as she remembered how much her grandson was looking forward to going to school before the end of the summer break.

She said: “Three of my family went to the school on Wednesday. Now I cannot find any of them. They have completely disappeared? I am at a loss. What are we going to do with those Chechens? And where, where have my children gone to?”

As the realisation of the scale of the damage that had been done to their small community set in, threats of revenge were also emerging.

“Fathers will bury their children, and after 40 days (the Orthodox Christian mourning period) they will take up weapons and seek revenge,” said Alan Kargiyev, a 20-year-old university student.

Some of the terrified schoolchildren who had gone to school last Wednesday for the first day of the new session yesterday spoke of their ordeal. However, it is likely it will take them years to recover from the trauma.

Six-year-old Marina Khudanova, went to school with her brother Beg. His whereabouts are unknown. His family are searching for him.

She said: “I tried to be as brave as I could. In the gym I could see them hanging up big bombs from the wall and on the railing. They told us that if we tried to leave, then the bombs would be detonated. I don’t want to go back to school. I never want to go back to school ever again. I want to stay here in the house with my Mummy. I don’t want to sleep. I just want to sit here and think.”

Jana, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, said the heat in the gymnasium had been unbearable.

She said: “They burst into the school and brought us all together in the gym. They made us all sit there. It was so hot. Many of the children were crying. We were so many and it became hot and sticky in there. They kept telling us to stay away from the cables they were rigging up to the bombs.

“They shouted at us and told us all to stay clear or we would all be blown up. I just sat there and made myself determined to get out of there and get home somehow and see my mother again.

“They told us that they were Chechens and that they wanted the Russian troops to get out their country. As soon as the troops pulled out, they said, we could go free.”

Then the bombs started to explode. Parts of the ceiling collapsed. “Shooting started, I rolled myself up on the floor, my face was to my knees and my hands over my head.”

When she looked up again there were three soldiers above her who were giving her cover as they placed her on a stretcher.

“I closed my eyes and lay as still as I could as they ran out with me on the stretcher. I was lucky, so lucky. The next time I opened my eyes I was outside the gym, I was safe, and I saw my mother’s face before me.”

In the aftermath at Middle School No 1, emergency workers waded through piles of smouldering rubble searching for more casualties. Most of the windows in the sports hall were shattered and its roof had been blown off almost entirely. Its walls were pocked with bullet holes.

Some 25 bodies were also laid out in the yard on Saturday morning, most in body bags.

As the details of the hostage crisis became clear yesterday, it emerged a number of hostages had been shot dead during its early hours and their bodies dumped out of a window.

Most of the dead had been in the school’s gymnasium. They were killed either by explosions that brought down the roof, mined by the hostage-takers, or by the chaotic fire and the battles between soldiers and captors that followed.

(Scotsman) ‘They are very cruel people… a ruthless enemy’. By Brian Brady. September 5, 2004.

IT WAS Alana Dzandarova’s first day at school on Wednesday. She dutifully turned up on time at School No1 in Beslan, with her mother and younger brother, and lined up in the yard with her new classmates at 9am. No one knows where she is today.

The first official duty of the six-year-old’s school career was to attend a ceremony marking the start of the academic year in North Ossetia. The ritual was never finished.

Shortly after 9am, the high-pitched hubbub of excited schoolchildren was replaced by the roar of heavy vehicles, shouting, barked commands and gunshots.

A Gaz-66 military lorry, escorted by a police car, sped into the school courtyard and began unloading its deadly cargo. Scores of men and women, masked and wearing bomb belts, burst out of the vehicles, hijacked in neighbouring Ingushetia, and into the playground with guns blazing.

Within minutes, more than 1,000 people were transformed from members of a school community into confused hostages, and herded inside the building.

In the anguished, hysterical fallout from an assault that has become the most distressing terrorist attack of modern times, the Russian authorities are inevitably facing demands to explain how they failed to prevent it. In truth, however, the scale of the atrocity and the fate of hundreds of victims were determined long before School No1 opened its gates on September 1.

The extremists who carried out the atrocity over three days were insanely cruel, but they had nonetheless planned their assault methodically. It emerged yesterday that they had been to the scene of their horrendous crime before.

Throughout the summer, they had been searching for a target of suitable vulnerability and impact. The attackers had scouted out two alternative establishments in the area, but School No1 had been undergoing extensive building work during the long summer break, most notably the replacement of the floor in the gymnasium, and it became the prime target.

The assault was a blitzkrieg attack made possible by months of planning. As the hostages were marched into the school building, their captives were already ripping up the floor of the gym to retrieve the hidden ammunition that would boost their arsenal to a formidable level.

The entire school was rigged with explosives. In the gymnasium itself, a mine was hoisted into the basketball hoop at each end of the building, guaranteeing that any attempt to rescue the captives by storming the building would bring down untold destruction upon the heads of the innocent.

By the time the police arrived, the school was quiet. They were confronted with the bodies of at least eight people killed during the original attack, lying in a playground that had already become an exclusion zone. The hostage-takers traded gunfire with the police before parading some of their younger captives as ‘human shields’ at the gym windows.

The confusion surrounding the emergency also clouded the true tally of hostages in School No1. The original, relatively low estimate offered by the authorities was to be angrily rejected by the first escapees.

“The director of the school was taken to a TV where they were saying there were 354 of us in here,” said Alana’s mother, Zalina Dzandarova, who along with her son Alan was among the first 26 hostages released but was forced to leave her daughter behind. “The director came back and she was in a state of shock, because there were in fact many more people there. There were definitely 1,000 people in that one room. I saw it with my own eyes.”

It was only after the siege had ended in shocking violence that it was finally confirmed that more than 1,200 people were crammed together in a gymnasium for 52 hours, when temperatures outside were climbing beyond 25 degrees.

Alana and the other confused captives were herded together and informed that they would only be released when their government agreed to independence for Chechnya.

Released hostages revealed that their captors did respond to some of their minor pleas during the earliest hours of the siege, including shooting out the gym windows to relieve the stifling heat and allowing their captives to drink water from a tap. But, beyond such tiny mercies, their control over their captives was unremittingly brutal and became ever more cruel as the crisis progressed.

The exhausted hostages were forced to sleep on top of one another amid the continuous sobbing of desperate children and helpless adults. The rebels quietened crying children by firing their guns into the air. They are also believed to have taken out at least 10 men and executed them soon after taking control of the school. “They were finished off in the corridor,” according to one freed hostage.

Eventually, as they received no positive responses to their demands, the guerrillas refused their captives their most basic requirements, refusing them access to the tap and stopping them even from drinking out of the toilet bowl. The powdered milk fed to the children was spooned dry into their mouths.

“They are very cruel people. We are facing a ruthless enemy,” said Leonid Roshal, a paediatrician involved in the negotiations. “I talked with them many times on my cell phone, but every time I ask to give food, water and medicine to the hostages they refuse my request.”

Roshal, summoned along with two regional leaders by the captors within hours of the start of the crisis, spent a traumatic and ultimately fruitless day attempting to bring an end to the drama. He was informed that the rebels’ demands included the release of fighters seized in neighbouring Ingushetia in June, and that if the Russians attempted to storm the building they would execute 50 hostages for each one of their number killed.

Frustrated, defeated and exhausted, Roshal’s contact with the group ended shortly before midnight on the first day of the siege. It had already become clear that the veteran negotiator, who had helped to resolve an earlier hostage crisis, could offer no compromise this time.

Wednesday was officially the last day of Vladimir Putin’s summer holiday, but he still had to cut it short when he was informed of the hostage crisis far away in North Ossetia. Barely an hour after the rebels entered the school playground, the President was on his way back to Moscow for an emergency meeting on the crisis.

Days after terrorist action brought down two Russian airliners, and bombers brought death to the Moscow underground, Putin was faced with yet more challenges from within, and his hardline stance against all opponents dictated a tough response. But Putin had reason to be cautious about any pursuit of an aggressive solution to the crisis.

“Our main task is, of course, to save the lives and health of those who became hostages,” he told a nation with bitter memories of the operation to end the Moscow Opera siege in 2002, which claimed the lives of more than 100 hostages. “All actions of our forces working on the hostages’ release will be devoted and be subject to this task exclusively.”

It was a measured response from a leader plunged into a no-win situation by adversaries who had shown themselves fully prepared to give their lives for their cause. Nonetheless, the Kremlin was already subtly ruling out compromise. It was Putin’s office that confirmed, and continually stressed, that the rebels were demanding independence for Chechnya, an area of huge strategic and historical importance to Moscow.

Despite the mounting pressures upon him, Putin was cheered by the overwhelming support of the public: on the eve of the bloody resolution of the crisis, a poll conducted by a Moscow radio station found that 64% would support him in “any actions” needed to end the siege.

Nevertheless, on Thursday evening, as the crisis gripped the government for a third day, the head of the Federal Security Service in North Ossetia insisted that Russia remained committed to a negotiated end.

“There is no question at the moment of opting for force,” said Valery Andreyev. “There will be a lengthy and tense process of negotiation.”

Putin’s administration did not relish the prospect of negotiation, but Andreyev’s declaration would prove to be an enormously optimistic assessment.

The thousands of people gathered outside the school, the distressed relatives sleeping on the ground and in their cars, feared the worst for their loved ones, but they were equally oblivious to the tragedy that lurked only hours away.

After an unsettled night, punctuated by loud bangs from within the school and “unprovoked” firing from rebels which reportedly left one policeman injured, the authorities restarted the arduous process of negotiation.

Despite reports that 20 male hostages had been executed inside the building, negotiators remained in contact with the rebels, in an attempt at least to arrange for the removal of the bodies that had been lying outside the school for two days.

But, shortly after Emergencies Ministry workers approached the school to retrieve the bodies, the uneasy truce was shattered.

The beginning of the end was announced by a series of explosions from within the school, which sparked panic among the terrified throng waiting outside. The blasts also triggered chaos inside the building, which a number of hostages seized upon as their cue to escape. As they scrambled to safety, the rebels shot at them, but the security forces returned covering fire and managed to lead 30 women and children away from the danger zone.

Moscow determinedly maintains that they were not planning an imminent assault on the building, but they were ready to take advantage of any opportunity to go in. With four helicopters circling overhead and reports that the gym roof had collapsed and militants were fleeing the building, Russian special forces finally entered the school after 2pm.

The invasion unleashed bedlam on the school and surrounding streets, as terrified children, many of them naked and bloodstained, streamed out of the building. The remaining rebels tried to shoot them in the back, and reportedly stabbed children left in the building as the authorities closed in.

A fleet of ambulances and private cars took hundreds of wounded hostages to nearby hospitals, as troops took control of the school and fought pitched battles with rebels within the building and elsewhere in the town. Commandos blew a hole in the wall of the building to help more hostages escape, but they found at least 100 people already dead in the gym.

The siege had come to a brutal and ugly end, but the full horrific scale of the crisis had not yet revealed itself. As the authorities uncovered more of the appalling carnage, as the death toll rose from 100, beyond 200 to more than 300 and desperate families searched for their relatives amid the confusion, an ashen-faced Putin was confronted with growing dismay over Russia’s failure to limit the tragedy.

“Taking advantage of the panic, hostages began to escape,” explained Lev Dzugayev, a spokesman for North Ossetia’s president. “The bandits began shooting them in the back. The special forces on our side had to cover the fleeing hostages. This is unfortunately how it happened.”

The end of the siege has not yet delivered Zalina Dzandarova to the woman forced to leave her daughter behind in the school. “I pressed Alan even stronger to myself, and I went out, and I heard all the time how my daughter was crying and calling for me behind my back. I thought my heart would break into pieces there and then.”

(The Observer) When hell came calling at Beslan’s School No 1. By Nick Paton Walsh and Peter Beaumount. September 5, 2004.

For Borik Rubaiv and hundreds of other pupils at Beslan’s Middle School Number One, it was to have been a celebration of the first day of the new school term. Parents carried flowers and teachers wore their best clothes. A Tannoy played music while the children formed lines alphabetically around the swing bars on the playground lawn.

It was some of the older children who noticed them first - a masked group quickly crossing the railway tracks that run behind the school. Some, giggling, thought it was a joke at first, until they picked up the anxiety of the adults waving at them to run.

‘The kids first ran towards them and then they ran back towards us in the school. Within moments, we were surrounded,’ said Borik’s aunt, Vala Hosanova

Some of the children further back were luckier. Diana Kubalova, 14, ran with some of her classmates, a parent and a teacher back into the boiler room, in the bowels of the school. There they hid as Russia’s worst-ever hostage crisis unfolded. Back in the playground, the militants quickly got their bearings. ‘They asked us where the sports hall was,’ said Hosanova. ‘They then said that, if we did not go in there immediately, we would all be shot.’

According to witnesses, this was not the only group of terrorists. Another band had infiltrated the school in a van.

While his friends were lining up, Soslan Bigayev, 13, had been wandering around the school looking at the renovation work that had been done. Thirsty, he headed for a water fountain.

‘I thank God that I became thirsty. It saved my life.’ While he was drinking, the second group drove into the school. ‘Men jumped out of the van,’ Bigayev said. ‘One of them had a long ginger beard, thick bushy eyebrows and a red-and-green skull-cap. He fired an automatic rifle into the air. I knew immediately that they were terrorists because of all the other attacks that I’ve seen on TV over the past few days.’

Bigayev fled. His friends fared worse. Caught between gunmen coming from two sides, an estimated 1,000 children, teachers and parents were herded at gunpoint into the gym, a new building about 10 metres wide and 25 metres long.

The first act of their captors was to order adults to hand over their mobile phones and cameras. It was the first sign that the militants had prepared well for their siege. Two years ago, when Chechen terrorists seized 800 theatre-goers in the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow, mobile phone calls had played a seminal role in helping the authorities to map out the layout of the crisis. Here, there would be no such errors and they would not be identified if they escaped.

And now it appears the planning had gone far further than learning from past mistakes. According to Russian state security officials, the gunmen and women had pre-planted extra weapons and explosives, smuggled into the school during rebuilding work over the summer holidays, and hidden them beneath floorboards.

As the militants filed through the school’s corridors, one of Kubalova’s friends peered through a crack in the door to see men with impressive beards - and two women wearing face masks and suicide bomber belts - march around the school, talking in Russian to each other, with what sounded like strong Chechen accents.

At that moment, Kubalova came across an Ossetian man, to whom she whispered for help. The militants heard, and ran towards the group, grabbing some, but allowing 14 to escape. The news of the seige of School Number One was out.

As local police rushed towards the red brick building, grabbing whatever escapees they could, the first exchanges of gunfire began and the first casualties fell dead.

Anatoli Sikoyev, a parent in his fifties who was recovering from a stroke, made a desperate dash to save his child that nearly cost him his life.

‘When I heard the news, I rushed to school to save my family’ he said from hospital that evening. ‘I approached the schoolyard and came across a man with a huge beard.

‘He shouted at me: “Lie down and crawl backwards”. I could not lie down, so I bent over and began to move back. Then another man shot at me from a window, hitting my hand and skimming my head. Now I am helpless and here.’

As the gunmen fired out of the windows at fleeing parents and children, inside the school the terrorists were also separating men from women, according to witnesses shooting several male teachers in the process.

Inside the gym, the terrorists were also busy rigging up a series of bombs. Two wires were run from the basketball hoops at either side of the hall. On these wires, and on the hoops, mines, each the size of a Mars bar, were intermittently strewn. The walls and entrances were also booby-trapped, and two large plastic containers were put in the middle of the floor.

The militants had also set the men to work dragging a cupboard across the gym’s main entrance, blocking it off, before they were marched to another room.

And as the fighters’ leaders introduced themselves to their captives by their noms de guerre, any doubts that they had about the identity of their kidnappers and the peril they were in were quickly dispelled.

According to the Kommer sant newspaper, they called themselves Magas, Fantomas and Abdullah, the first two of whom were associates of the notorious Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.

The newspaper identified Magas as Magomed Yevloyev, an Ingush who organised the bloody raid on Ingushetia on 22 June, in which more than 90 people died. Fantomas is a former bodyguard of Basayev, who is alleged to be an ethnic Russian.

Other Russian media identified the leader as Doka Umarov, a Chechen separatist leader.

Terrified, the thousand hostages inside the gym tried to adjust to the stifling cattle-truck conditions, leading many to strip off their clothes and others to have panic attacks and breathing difficulties.

Children and women had to sit shoulder to shoulder. ‘There was not enough room to stretch out your legs,’ said Hosanova. ‘Sweat was trickling down us. We could not breathe.

‘They had opened a tiny gap in the windows at the top, but that was having no effect. It was like a sauna in there, but they refused to make it any cooler.’

The terrorists moved quickly to establish their control over the captives. ‘Three women in suicide bomber belts and masks said that, if we cried or shouted, they would take action’, said Hosanova. To ensure the hostages that their rules were not for breaking, they killed a man whom they had caught using his phone. ‘We will kill 20 to 40 of you if you use these again’, they warned.

Outside the school, the chaotic scenes that had greeted the first attempt by local police and militia to rush the building was rapidly settling into an armed stand-off.

As the gunmen and bombers inside secured the school’s buildings, Russian security forces - including officers from the Ministry of the Interior and OMON - had set up their own perimeters, bringing forward armoured cars and snipers.

The residents of Beslan, a town of 35,000, also appeared, some armed with weapons and sporting white armbands to distinguish them from the gunmen. There were perhaps as many as 5,000 of them.

Specialist rescue teams had been brought in too from Russia’s Ministry of Emergencies, to deal with the crisis. But, for all the preparations, one error would be made that would later contribute to the huge death toll - too few ambulances would be brought up outside the school.

And it was not only on the ground, outside Beslan’s School Number One, that the security authorities had gone quickly into emergency mode. In the Kremlin, too, the phone lines were buzzing as President Vladimir Putin’s officials demanded to know what was going on - and precisely what the kidnappers were demanding.

For despite the obvious - that the latest terrorist atrocity was somehow linked to Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya - how and why was still not clear.

The demands were not to become any little clearer until just a few hours before the siege reached its awful and bloody denouement.

North Ossetia’s leader, Alexander Dzasokhov, briefed journalists on his knowledge of the negotiations that were already in train.

‘They said Chechnya should be separate from Russia, be an independent state. But they didn’t go beyond this assertion. They didn’t say who they would like to talk to, or anything. My impression is that they are cut off from the outside world,’ he said.

The Russian authorities had already made a decision totally out of keeping with their customary violent approach to Chechen hostage-takers. Faced with the risk of another disaster such as the Moscow theatre siege, which ended in scores being asphyxiated when Russian special forces used gas to subdue all within the auditorium, the Russians would talk. More extraordinarily, the Kremlin would ask for help from Chechen separatist leaders whom it had long regarded as beyond the pale.

Unusually, Putin himself, who ordinarily wastes no opportunity to expound his beliefs on Russia’s fight against terror and who rose to power on the back of the Chechen threat, at first remained silent.

When he finally broke his silence, it was only on Thursday, a day into the siege. And then it was to reinforce the growing belief that Russian forces would negotiate, not storm the building.

‘Our main task is, of course, to save the life and health of those who became hostages. We understand these acts are not only against private citizens of Russia, but against Russia as a whole. What is happening in North Ossetia is horrible,’ he said in remarks shown on Russian television.

Inside the school, the terrorists were formulating their demands, which were passed in two notes to police outside. They sought the release of 24 militants arrested after a June raid by suspected Chechen separatists on neighbouring Ingushetia, in which Fantomas and Magas were implicated. They wanted to meet the presidents of Ingushetia and of North Ossetia, and other senior officials. And of course, they made the key and unfulfillable demand - the same that the Dubrovka hostage-takers had - of a complete Russian military withdrawal from Chechnya. At 15:38, they said, they would kill 50 hostages for each one of them who died and kill 20 if they were injured.

Inside they made a show of the lethal force they were prepared to use on themselves as well as their thousand hostages. About 20 of the men were gathered up and taken to the second floor of the main school building, to the right of the gym.

There, they were shot dead. One survivor said that she thought a female suicide bomber may also have been involved in their murder. Their bodies were thrown out of the windows and left to rot in the afternoon sun.

After that, the first night of the siege in the school passed quietly.

A few hostages had been allowed to drink water from the taps and showers in the changing rooms next to the gym. Only a few exchanges of gunfire and grenade blasts breached the calm of the siege.

But by the following morning, the mood worsened. The militants began the day by upping the stakes.

‘They smashed the handles off the taps in the changing room so we could not use them’, said Hosanova. ‘Water became a big problem. We had to wring out our clothes to drink our sweat from them. We even drank our own urine, the children were so thirsty.’

Sitting in her flat yesterday, wretchedly awaiting news of her missing sister and niece, she shows with her dress how they demanded the children make a filter of four layers of clothes through which they could drink their own urine.

‘The smell had become unbelievably bad by then’, she said.

Inside the school, the tension was rising as conditions worsened. Random grenade blasts and gunfire sent ripples of tension through the crowds, tearful women ducking as explosions rocked the courtyard.

Tamara Peroyeva, 63, knew that something would have to give soon. She was sandwiched between two complete strangers, all of them in relative states of undress, writhing around in the grime of the gym floor and their own waste. Her grandson and other kids had used her belly as a pillow and for while they had laid on top of each other to try to keep up their strength.

Then the children had decided that chanting might change the militants’ minds. ‘Water, water, water’, went the chant, as if they had forgotten this was not a normal gym class. ‘We still had not seen any water, and the kids were crying’, she said. ‘The terrorists tried shooting in the air to silence them - there was nothing else that appeared to work.’

But as night drew in, and the authorities promised again there would be no siege, the chaos grew worse. ‘The shooting stopped them crying for five minutes, but then they started up again.’

As dawn broke on Friday, Hosanova felt that events were about to take a turn for the worse.

The militants told them that, ‘If they come at us with tanks, we will fight back until we run out of ammunition. But then we will take your lives as well as our own.’ She noticed also that the male militants had begun whispering to each other for the first time, clearly not wanting to be overheard by the hostages. ‘If they start a storm then only you will be to blame,’ one said.

It was at 13:05, just a few moments after traditional Muslim prayers, that the day broke apart.

The men from the Russian MInistry of Emergencies had been nervous about their mission, but were keen to do it. After negotiations with the gunmen inside the school, they had been told that they could collect some of the bodies lying both inside and outside the buildings, because dogs had begun to worry some of the corpses.

Entering the school in two ambulances, they carefully left their vehicles and crossed to where they could see the first of the bodies, one of them propped up against a car. As the paramedics picked up the first two corpses, the air was rent by two powerful blasts, followed by the sound of small arms fire.

As the emergency workers took cover, they saw a middle-aged man emerge from the smoke, wearing only a pair of trousers, covered in dirt.

Startled into action by the two explosions, Russian troops staggered forward and began firing at the windows of the school, in an attempt to cover the escape of the bloodied survivors who were beginning to emerge from the building. At the same time, two Russian tanks moved in.

Inside the school, Hosanova recalls that she was sitting calmly when the first explosion sounded. She believes that one of the mines strung up between the basketball hoops in the gym had gone off.

‘We all fell down and held our he