At first it seemed like someone had made an embarrassing mistake. The presidential aide to the North Caucases, Vladimir Yakovlev, said on Russian news wires that an entire school had been kidnapped. This was so hard to believe that it took a while before the rush to head south.
Beslan airport was promptly closed, and we opted to concentrate on using a local stringer and a proper package for Thursday's paper (Sept 2). The Times and The Independent (two other British national papers) headed straight for Beslan and got there at about 11pm.
I landed about 14 hours later at the same Mineralniye Vodi airport, two hours north of Beslan.
At the airport, a gruff policeman dragged me into a cramped office where they made it clear they were looking for a German reporter and al-Jazeera. They let us go after photocopying our documents. Two hours later, we crossed into Northern Ossetia easily.
Others were less lucky -- Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter known for her bold coverage of Chechnya, and a Georgian TV crew saying they were drugged, presumably by the authorities.
But once we were in Beslan, federal control evaporated. Before the siege began, a cordon was maintained by local police and some federal troops, blocking all vantage points onto the school. The gunmen had been taking pot shots and blew up a car that came too close on Thursday.
For the next two days, a tense group of about 200 journalists milled around the Palace of Culture, a cinema where officials gave press conferences. The information came out in dribs and drabs, not much of it credible. Mobile phone coverage was patchy, many people switching to the local network or satphones.
Up until Friday morning -- the final day of the siege -- official spokesmen had left the total of hostages at 354 -- perhaps a quarter of the final total. It was a tacit admission the casualty figures would be high. During one such announcement, the crowd jeered the official, unable to tolerate the falsehoods any more.
There was little for relatives to do other than talk anxiously to the media. Many were hard to talk to: the Caucasus mentality is strictly private in grief. Some were angered by the intrusion.
I ended up staying with a local family. It was Thursday night, and I had a low battery on my laptop and an imminent deadline. I knocked on a random door and the grandmother let me use their electric socket. The son, Gior, 13, was edgy. His mother was inside the school, as was his sister, aged seven (they are both safe now).
He had been expelled from the school recently for bullying. They offered me their couch.
The mother and father were local law enforcement officials. My host, who insisted on getting me very drunk the night after the siege and his wife's release, used his status to get me access and introduce me to families who would otherwise have kept mum.
At one point, my host was discussing the siege in his kitchen with two friends. I interrupted him to correct him over the timing of the first explosion in the school.
He looked at me and grinned: "You see. He wrote it all down," he told his friends.
He saw the press as the only chance of hearing the truth about what happened at Beslan.
On Friday, at 1:05pm, I was near the local administration building when a huge blast shook the floor. Then another; then gunfire; the blasts and gunfire kept getting nearer. "It" had clearly started.
The living bodies of children, covered in someone else's blood and their own grime, were carried out via the gaps between the buildings. One policeman said there had been an explosion, that no gunmen had died and hostages had.
I approached a normally charming senior Kremlin press aide to ask in Russian if the siege had officially started. He looked at me, furious and panicked. "Be gone," he screamed, pointing the way out.
Thirty minutes later I moved round to where the school meets the railway line. There stood two Russian tanks and one uptight spetznaz soldier. While he insisted I leave, the local militia goons, sweaty men in tracksuits carrying hunting rifles, asked if I wanted to hang out with them, 10m away from the school. I was soon dragged away.
At the Palace of Culture, the cordon that once held us back had disappeared. The small paths down from the school had become a shuttle service for stretchers. Those carrying casualties were greeted with little bar cameras, a few emergency workers, sequestered cars and some anxious locals. Three days in, the press had managed to get there from London, but the Russian government had not managed to create a proper triage system.
It was a mess. Bodies were dumped on the grass verge. Some journalists tried to do live broadcasts, while others ducked behind walls. I noticed a column of local men heading up one path towards the school itself and followed. A series of garages provided some cover about 10m to the left of the school courtyard. Here I met the London Telegraph, the Baltimore Sun and a Sky News cameraman.
Locals were everywhere -- be they militia or anxious parents. Throughout the siege, Western television -- CNN, BBC, Sky -- carried live footage. But Russian state TV -- and even local TV -- used live and pre-recorded shots that they played in hourly bulletins. The people of Beslan had to go to the site of the siege to follow what was happening.
Anarchy ruled. The federal government sent in their finest special forces to fight, but did not use their plentiful conscripts to erect a protective cordon for their operation. Half an hour after the Dubrovka theater siege in Moscow two years ago, I had to barge authoritatively through a line of tired conscripts to reach the front of the theatre to see the triage. I was also detained as I tried to leave the theater siege site.
In Beslan, 90 minutes into the siege, there was no line to cross and only your judgment held you back. It was possible to walk through one garage, whose back wall had been punctured to provide an escape route for hostages, and see the school's yard.
I walked round to the front of the school where the fighting was most intense and hid behind a wall, ducking low behind a crowd of large, tall men, gaping as if they were at a football match.
One stray round caused the gaggle to step back. But then some, a few in tracksuits, a few in smocks, strolled in a column down one wall that linked the garages to the gym, the site of the massacre.
The siege was ongoing, but had apparently moved to the back of the school. Few stray rounds were hitting the courtyard now. I feared access to the scene would be impossible later, so I headed towards the gym.
Seen from the gym door, the floor contained nothing recognizable except roof material and some black mulch. It had clearly been completely destroyed. I crossed over to the other side of the courtyard. I moved down to the other side of the gym where a Russian cameraman and photographer joined local militia and spetznaz.
More bodies were being brought out of the window. Inside, the walls were blown plasterless.
At 4:30pm, the stream of corpses coming from the school was still endless. The gunfire and blasts were still constant. My desk insisted that I start writing at 5pm. The gunfire continued, but I left and interviewed my host's wife, who had a detailed grasp of events inside the gym.
I had seen enough.
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