Flags flew at half-mast across Russia as thousands of mourners attended funerals at the start of two days of national mourning for the 338 people killed when suspected Chechen rebels seized a school in North Ossetia last week.
At least 338 people, half of them children, were killed during a bloodbath that ended last week's 53-hour siege of the school by Chechen separatists.
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| A video frame taken from Russian television shows an alleged member of the hostage gang |
In Beslan, not far from Muslim Chechnya but religiously and ethnically distinct, authorities took over land the size of a soccer pitch next to the cemetery to find room to bury the dead.
Processions moving slowly behind large wooden crosses passed through the town in the downpour for more than 100 funerals today.
Mourners' open coffins filled with flowers, their wails often drowned out by the drone of mechanical diggers excavating yet more graves. A mother and her two children shared one grave.
"I feel terrible. I had a sister here who died. My other sister is in hospital. What can I feel? Do you hear people crying? That's how I feel," said Beslan resident Rustan on the first of two days of national mourning.
Troops have tightened security at North Ossetia's boundaries with other regions in case fury over the carnage should stoke tensions in the Caucasus region of southern Russia.
NATO states and Russia were to meet to discuss the siege on Tuesday. The European Union expressed solidarity, seeking to defuse a row after Moscow reacted angrily to a request by the Dutch EU presidency for an explanation for the carnage.
But French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said Paris had already requested such details.
"Indeed, we want to express both our solidarity over this act of terrorism against Russia but also we want to have all the necessary information and we remind Russia every time we meet of the need to respect human rights," Raffarin told a radio debate.
In Russia, there has been anger at the chaotic storming of the school by Russian troops and at President Vladimir Putin's assertion that Russia was the victim of "international terror" rather than homegrown Chechen extremists.
"The official claim that international terrorism is behind the Beslan tragedy is a trick designed to divert responsibility away from the Kremlin," said liberal politician Boris Nemtsov.
Putin, a former KGB spy, came to power four years ago promising to stamp out separatism and build a strong state. In the last weeks, two airliners blew up in mid-air and a suicide bomber killed nine pedestrians near a Moscow metro station.
"We are absolutely defenceless in the air, in the metro, in our own capital and outside it," parliamentarian Vladimir Ryzhkov wrote in Nezavisimaya daily.
But analysts saw no significant damage to Putin's position and predicted he would put Russia under even tighter control.
Television showed new footage of a man identified as a captured hostage-taker who said he and his comrades had been told the order to seize the school came from fugitive Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and radical rebel Shamil Basayev.
He said the group had been told the aim was to "trigger a war throughout the Caucasus" -- a consequence Putin warned of last week as the siege proceeded.
Writing on the Internet site www.kavkazcenter.com, Maskhadov again denied involvement, saying targeting civilians "hindered international recognition of an independent Chechen state".
The gutted school gymnasium, where the rebels held more than 1,000 children, parents and teachers attending the first day of term, has turned into an unofficial shrine. Deprived of water by their abductors, children stripped to their underwear and drank their own urine in the stifling gym.
Bottles of water, flowers, and pictures of missing children have been placed among the rubble. Bottles were also placed on the graves on the outskirts of Beslan.
Atsamas Beguyev, 11, showed this reporter holes in the gym's wooden floor where the rebels had stashed ammunition beforehand and explosives later suspended between basketball hoops.
Across Russia, flags flew at half mast and television stations cancelled entertainment programmes - the second period of national mourning in as many weeks following the air crashes.