The missing: Hundreds of families were searching last night for their children and relatives among the wreckage of Middle School No 1, in hospitals and in the region's morgue. Three days after the bloody end to the Beslan siege, 180 were still listed as missing.
Distraught relatives, losing all faith in the ability of local authorities to control the situation, lined the streets with pictures of their missing children in the hope of receiving information from anyone who might have seen them. As the town filled with wailing amid the first burials of the victims, photocopied pictures appeared on the streets around the blasted remains of the school.
One, of 12-year-old Aza Gumetsova, bore the words: "If anyone knows of her whereabouts, please call this number." Next to her was pinned a photo of her classmate, Irina Pukhayeva: "If you saw her after the explosion, please call ..." The official list of the missing was pasted over the walls of the Palace of Culture. It is a document increasingly laden with dread.
Valik Burnatsev and his wife had been there since the siege began five days ago. Yet still he knows nothing of his sister, Elvira, 43, and her daughter, Diana, nine. "We've looked all over the republic. In the hospitals. With our friends. In the morgue. We've put her name on the list of the missing." At the morgue in the regional capital Vladikavkaz, where the dead were gathered for identification, over 120 bodies still lay on the terrace outside in the light rain, their pungent smell filling the air. Some bodies were so burned and blasted as to be unrecognisable to relatives.
Beslan's families, those frantically searching and those already grieving, were yesterday obsessed with the need for a response. In some cases they sought information. In others, revenge. Rumours already began to circulate of acts of revenge. Russian media reported that some locals had headed into neighbouring Ingushetia - from where some of the militants are thought to have come - and abducted 10 Ingush men.
Valik Burnatsev's expression cracked into a twisted smile when asked if he thought that there would be more bloodshed.
"Yes," he nodded. "There will be. I know a lot about that." Asked what he meant, he looked up at the sky and said : "Only God can tell you how it will happen."
Aslan, a local prison official, sat smouldering in his kitchen with two colleagues. His wife and daughter were saved, but he still shares the local anger. "It was absolute chaos during the siege. There was little federal help." Anger grew towards the Kremlin and the distance it had kept from the hostage crisis.
Some of those who are unaccounted for are suspected to be young children in hospital who cannot identify themselves, but many others may have died in the explosions, shooting and fire that swept the school on Friday.
Officials say that were were more than 1,100 hostages in the school although the exact number is still not known. Only some of the dead have been identified and it may only be possible to identify many of the bodies through DNA tests.
During the siege no secure perimeter was set up by the hundreds of troops in the area, allowing locals into the area as the standoff continued.
Even yesterday the chaos continued at the school. The site was open to the public, the grieving or even simply curious clambering over rubble that had a day earlier been the site of intensive mine sapper activity. A policeman crouched next to an unexploded tank shell, part buried in the school's playground, among the stream of visitors.
The floorboards of the gym had been exposed by the constant scraping of visitors' feet over its black, ashen covering. In the corridors, there remained a child's shoe, exercise books, a blood-covered blackboard wiper, and a child's rucksack.
Rescuers had made their final grim discovery late on Saturday night in the basement. A local health official said the bodies of up to 10 children were found there, the site of the final stand of one of the militants.
Yesterday the reason for the blast that sparked the storming of the school remained unclear according to official accounts, yet eyewitnesses were insistent that the first explosion was inside the gym. One survivor, Ilfa Gagiyeva, a police investigator, said the explosion was accidental. It happened when one of the mines strung up between the two basketball hoops in the gym fell off its wire and landed on the head of a hostage. The young woman brushed it off her head, and it then exploded when it hit the ground, she said. Then the shooting started. - (Guardian Service)