Images from Beslan school to haunt a nation

MOSCOW - Russian television has broadcast haunting pictures from inside the Beslan school during the three-day siege, showing the masked attackers with their captives.

The graphic video showed the 1000 seated children and their teachers, some semi-naked in the heat, crowded into the gym and guarded by their captors, who included masked and armed men and a woman in a black headdress.

One of the attackers was heard talking on a mobile phone at the end of the one-and-a-half-minute video. He was not speaking in Russian - a revelation that could boost the official theory that the hostage-takers were international terrorists.

The images were shown soon after Russians had taken to the streets in their hundreds of thousands in rallies across the country to denounce terrorism. Responding to appeals from President Vladimir Putin's party, more than 130,000 people converged on Red Square in Moscow. Security was tight. Speakers echoed Putin's statements that terrorists must be crushed. But there was no doubt the entire Russian nation wanted to express its solidarity with the victims.

Similar rallies were staged across Russia and in the capitals of former Soviet republics, including Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

The Russian Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov, said yesterday that "not a single Chechen" had been identified among the bodies of the 30 hostage-takers - although only half of them have been identified so far.

One of three hostage-takers captured by the Russian forces has accused the elected Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov and the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev of having ordered the hostage-taking.

- INDEPENDENT