More than 100,000 people were expected in central Moscow yesterday at a rally to condemn terrorism amid mounting rage across the country over the bloody hostage drama in southern Russia and the government's handling of it.
Scores of school children killed in the siege were laid to rest Monday in an overflowing cemetery amid wrenching grief in the town of Beslan, in the southern republic of North Ossetia.
PHOTO: AFP
Funeral processions filled the streets of Beslan throughout the day as distraught crowds converged on the town's cemetery for the burials of 192 victims.
A three-day standoff at Beslan's main school ended in carnage on Friday after security forces stormed the building following a series of explosions. A total of 335 people, half of them children, are confirmed dead, and more than 400 former hostages, including 225 children, remain in hospital.
According to official estimates, 18 of the estimated 1,000 people held hostage by militants demanding independence for Chechnya are still unaccounted for, their families unable to find them either in morgues or hospitals.
The catastrophe was the worst of its kind in modern Russian history and was only the latest in a string of recent attacks that included the downing of two passenger jets and a suicide bombing outside a crowded Moscow subway station.
Unlike those attacks however, the bloodshed in Beslan has sparked a primal anger among some Russians that the government was struggling to dispel.
The Russian press lashed out at President Vladimir Putin, saying his effort to link rebel fighters in Chechnya with international terrorism was a cynical ploy to escape blame for his uncompromising policy on the separatist fighters.
Mounting criticism of Putin and the government however was counterbalanced by a surge of rage against "terrorists" who have carried out the attacks in Russia and displays of nationalist fervor.
In Saint Petersburg, some 15,000 people turned out Monday for a rally in remembrance of the Beslan victims and condemnation of terrorism. Many carried Russian flags and signs bearing slogans such as "Death to Killers of Children."
An "anti-terror" demonstration was scheduled to be held yesterday beside the Kremlin, the end of a two-day official national mourning period. Organizers, the Kremlin among them, said they were expecting a turnout exceeding 100,000 people.
Russian officials meanwhile reiterated their affirmation that Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev masterminded the Beslan attack.
Rossiya channel paraded what officials said was the only suspected hostage-taker still alive -- a man, who appeared to be from the Caucasus, confessing in a slurred voice to his involvement in the bloody hostage drama.
"They gathered us in a forest, a person known as `commander,' and they said that we must seize a school in Beslan. They said this task was ordered by [Chechen rebel leader Aslan] Maskhadov and Basayev," the dark-haired young man said haltingly.
The detained suspect, who said there were Uzbeks, Arabs and Chechens among the hostage-takers, added that he had been told the aim of the raid was to "provoke a war across the Caucasus."
The suspect, now in the hands of the intelligence services and whose name and nationality were not released, was firing with an automatic weapon and hiding behind children at the moment of his capture, according to Channel One.
Mikhail Lapotnikov, chief investigator for the north Caucasus prosecutor's office, was quoted by Interfax as saying that the hostage-takers, believed to number around 30, also took part in a raid in Ingushetia last June claimed by Basayev.
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