Wails of mourning echoed through the streets of this southern Russian town on yesterday, and the region's top police officer reportedly resigned in the wake of the school hostage taking that left more than 350 people -- nearly half of them children -- dead.
A shaken President Vladimir Putin went on national television Saturday to make a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists. He told the Russian people that they must mobilize against terrorism and promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption.
"We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten," he said in an address aimed at addressing the grief, shock and anger felt by many after a string of terrorist attacks that have killed some 450 people in the past two weeks, apparently in connection with the war in Chechnya.
Dozens of men dug graves in a football field-sized tract next to the Beslan cemetery on Sunday morning, while surveyors across the road marked out new plots with wooden stakes and string. Coffin lids stood outside the entrances to apartment buildings, along with wooden planks bearing the names of victims who were to be buried in funerals beginning later Sunday, and wailing could be heard from courtyards where families were cutting up meat for ritual meals.
Some 260 people were reported missing after the three-day hostage crisis, which ended in a bloody wave of explosions and gunfire Friday when militants set off bombs rigged in the school gymnasium and commandos stormed the building. Russian media speculated that some of the missing could be among the wounded who were brought to various hospitals in the southern Russian region, unconscious or in too deep a state of shock to be able to identify themselves.
Outside the shattered gymnasium yesterday, Svetlana Debloyeva, 42, clutched a picture of her 11-year-old son Zaur, who was unaccounted for.
"I lost my boy," she cried as she approached the building, where she had been squeezed in among the more than 1,100 hostages.
Regional Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said yesterday that 326 people, including 159 children, were killed -- three of them children who died overnight.
More than 540 people were wounded -- mostly children. Medical officials said 423 people remained hospitalized Sunday, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
Dzgoyev also said 35 attackers -- heavily-armed and explosive-laden men and women who were reportedly demanding independence for Chechnya -- were killed in 10 hours of battles that shook the area around the school with gunfire and explosions. Including the militants, 361 people died in the tragedy.
"What happened was a terrorist act that was inhuman and unprecedented in its cruelty," Putin said in his televised speech. "It is a challenge not to the president, the parliament and the government but a challenge to all of Russia, to all of our people. It is an attack on our nation."
Putin took a defiant tone, acknowledging Russia's weaknesses, but blaming it on the fall of the Soviet Union, foreign foes seeking to tear apart Russia and on corrupt officials.
He said Russians could no longer live "carefree" and must all confront terrorism.
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