RUSSIA: For 61 hours, 1,200 people feared their lives holed up in a school in Beslan. More than 330 of them lost the battle. And still it is all shrouded in mystery writes Daniel Mclaughlin.
Three weeks after the siege in Beslan, Russians are wondering how 30 armed guerrillas managed to hold their children and the Kremlin to ransom, and who is to blame for the secrecy and chaos that surrounded its bloody denouement.
More than 330 people, almost half of them children, died in a hail of explosions and bullets when special forces and armed civilians stormed the school, after two blasts inside the building sent hostages fleeing for their life under fire from the gunmen.
But far from lending some clarity to the mayhem, time seems only to thicken the fog of confusion around the siege, and has Russians scrabbling to glean whatever information they can from mostly pro-Kremlin media.
Critics say the security services, perhaps with backing from senior politicians, systematically lied about the crisis from the start, and showed little willingness to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis.
Officials insisted for almost two days that there were only about 350 people inside the school, and later that the gunmen's demands were too vague for meaningful discussion, and that there were many Arabs and a black African in their ranks, suggesting a link to international terror groups.
As it transpired, some 1,200 people were trapped inside, and those who negotiated with the hostage-takers have said that their main demand was independence for Chechnya.
The president of North Ossetia, Mr Alexander Dzasokhov, moved this week to deflect criticism of his lack of action during the siege in his region, suggesting that the Kremlin's men prevented him from interceding in the crisis.
"I arrived in Beslan 25 minutes after the school was seized. And by around 10.30a.m. I had already made a decision that I should go into the school. But I was given a strict order: 'This is not allowed!'" He declined to say who gave him the order, but insisted that a deputy interior minister on the scene "had an order to arrest (me) if I attempted to go into the school." Mr Dzasokhov said Mr Ruslan Aushev, the former Ingushetia premier, came back from talks with the gunmen clutching a copy of their demands.
"The truth is as follows: When Aushev came out of the captured school, he was carrying a piece of squared paper out of a school exercise book," he told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
"The only thing I recall is that the terrorists were demanding independence for Chechnya and its admission to the Commonwealth of Independent States. There was no signature on the paper. The text was immediately sent to Moscow." The rebels also requested a meeting with the current leader of Ingushetia, Mr Murat Zyazikov, who critics accuse of sanctioning kidnappings, torture and even murder to quash suspected support in his region for Chechnya's rebels.
His regime was rattled by a guerrilla raid in June that left dozens of servicemen dead and many of the attackers in jail.
Mr Sergei Butin, an aide to parliamentarian Mr Dmitry Rogozin, was quoted as saying that his boss called Mr Zyazikov on the first day of the crisis.
According to Mr Butin: "This is the entire conversation: 'Murat, are you away?' 'Yes.' 'How far away are you?' 'Very far away.' And he \ hung up and switched off his phone." President Vladimir Putin's advisor on Chechnya, Mr Aslambek Aslakhanov, claims he was initially prevented from flying to Beslan to meet the rebels' request for negotiations.
When he spoke to the gunmen by phone, he says they demanded independence for Chechnya, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the region and the release of the guerrillas arrested in Ingushetia. The militants agreed to meet him at 3p.m. on Friday afternoon.
About two hours before that, explosions rocked the school, and the final gunfight began. The Kremlin says the rebels' bombs went off accidentally; a Chechen warlord who took responsibility for the attack says Russian special forces tried to storm the building.
"We were simply late," said Mr Aslakhanov. "As soon as I arrived ... at the airport, there was already a gun battle going on. I thought to myself, how could this happen?" Two parliamentary committees have been established to answer that question, but liberals say their pro-Kremlin bias makes an impartial inquiry impossible.
Mr Dzasokhov says North Ossetia's interior minister has been sacked over the crisis, along with a few police for either failing to stop the rebels entering the region or taking bribes to let them pass.
Former Soviet President Mr Mikhail Gorbachev has called for the Interior Minister, Mr Rashid Nurgaliyev, and the head of the domestic security service, Mr Nikolai Patrushev, to take responsibility for failings in and around Beslan.
Both men are allies of Mr Putin, and they arrived discretely in North Ossetia five hours after the gunmen seized the school. What they did there remains a mystery.