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Russia mourns school massacre

People prepare graves for victims of the school hostage drama in Beslan, North Ossetia, yesterday. Two days of national mourning began yesterday in Russia for the people killed in last week's bloody school siege as at least 377 injured remained in hospital. The terrorists held a total of 1,180 people during the siege at Beslan's School Number One, according to official sources. PHOTO: EPA

Russia, stunned by the deaths of more than 300 people in the country's worst ever hostage drama, began an official period of national mourning yesterday as the grief-stricken town of Beslan was set to continue the grim task of burying the victims.

Dozens of well-wishers on Sunday laid red carnations and plastic bottles of water at the wreckage of School Number One, its charred remains a haunting memory to a three-day standoff that ended with a massacre in some of the most violent scenes in recent Russian history.

The water bottles were a stark symbol of how the children were left without water or food by their captors, militants demanding independence for separatist Chechnya.

Surviving students were allowed into the building for the first time on Sunday, one girl laying a flower on the shattered windowsill of her old classroom, another wiping away tears with her fists as she gingerly stepped through a shattered hall.

Casualty figures continued to swing wildly, with the official death toll from Friday's carnage standing at 335 people although a worker in the region's main morgue told reporters that it had already received 394 bodies.

Some 377 people, including 197 children under 17, remained in local medical care, 55 of them in severe condition, North Ossetia's Deputy Health Minister Teymuraz Revazov said on Monday as quoted by the Interfax news agency.

Another 27 children who were rushed to hospitals in Moscow and Rostov-on-Don over the weekend also remain in severe condition, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported quoting hospital officials.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared two days of national mourning from yesterday. All flags are to fly at half mast over government buildings and entertainment programs were to be pulled off the air, the Kremlin said.

Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said in comments broadcast by Russia's Channel One television that the first militant was due to be charged late Sunday.

"This man personally took part in the attack, he was part of that gang, he took part in shooting. Today he will be charged," said Fridinsky. "They will all be punished for all the crimes they committed, and this man among others."

The suspect, whose name and nationality were not released, was shown with his hands handcuffed behind his back, insisting in strongly accented Russian that "By Allah, I have not shot."

On Sunday it seemed everyone in Beslan, a town of 40,000 in the southern republic of North Ossetia, was walking around with photos of lost relatives or friends in their breast pockets, showing them to every person who passed by, hoping against hope to locate their loved ones.

Meanwhile coffins made their steady progress under gray clouds to a field freshly dug up by excavators for dozens of new graves as Beslan began to bury the victims.

"People come here to pay their respects and then many will go to another funeral," said one resident. "Attending a funeral is sacred here. This is nothing, there aren't many funerals today. Wait until tomorrow. The whole town will be paralyzed."

"The whole world now knows this little town. It would have been better if no one knew where Beslan was," a man said softly during a funeral ceremony.

Amid a steady wail, the first dozen coffins were lowered into the ground and the Patriarch of Russia's Orthodox church, Alexy II, asked that a mass be held in every church across the country to remember the victims.

Amid a wave of attacks linked to Chechnya that have now killed hundreds in just over a week, Putin -- who rose to power on a law and order ticket -- vowed before the nation to toughen up security and admitted to some "weakness" in the past.

The interior minister of North Ossetia resigned within hours of Putin's comments on Saturday.

Security forces alleged the attack had been meticulously planned weeks before pupils returned to school on Wednesday after the summer break, with militants having posed as builders to stash explosives in the school.

Survivors told of the terror inside the gym, where they were forced to drink their own urine to avoid dehydration and to strip down to their underwear to cope with the stifling heat.

But Friday's harrowing scenes were a grim reminder of a botched rescue attempt of hostages in a Moscow theater in October 2002 in which 129 hostages were killed -- most of them when security forces pumped a toxic gas into the building.
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