Stunned with grief, Beslan begins to say its goodbyes

1.00pm - By ANDREW OSBORN

BESLAN, North Ossetia - The little girl's face was waxy, her mouth covered with a simple strip of bloodstained, white fabric and her coffin full of red roses and Barbie dolls.

A relative held up a framed picture of what she looked like in life; a smiling 11-year-old in her school uniform, a blue dress and a white polo neck.

As Alina Felixovna Khubetseva was lowered into the ground, her mother and relatives began to wail and a four-piece band played the funeral march under a grey, rain-filled sky.

"My daughter, my poor daughter," her mother sobbed, shaking her head towards the heavens as she wrapped her shaking arms around a female relative for comfort.

Three days earlier, Alina had been one of hundreds of frightened school children held captive inside the school's gym.

It is not known exactly how she died but it is thought that she perished when terrorists detonated mines that brought the hall's ceiling crashing down on up to 500 children below.

In a sprawling field on the outskirts of Beslan, surrounded by grazing cows and fog-wrapped hills, this small southern Russian town that few had heard of before last Tuesday buried some of its dead.

Mechanical diggers gouged out graves that stretched for as far as the eye could see. Officials said the death toll from last Friday's bloodbath had risen to at least 394 and was likely to go higher.

Many of those in hospital remained in a serious condition and scores of people still had no idea whether their loved ones were alive or dead.

Black and white photographs of some of the missing were posted outside the town's cultural centre, asking anyone who knew anything to phone the children's desperate parents.

The scale of the funerals deprived the dead of some of the dignity they were due. Separated by only a few metres, the services were conducted simultaneously with four or five bodies being lowered into the ground at any given moment.

Piles of dark brown earth and red bricks littered the field in preparation for hundreds more funerals as mourners bade a final farewell to School Number 1's pupils.

The intense heat of the last few days meant that many of the bodies haddecomposed and, although they had been treated with chemicals, the smell of rotting flesh was unmistakeable, forcing many of the mourners to press handkerchiefs to their noses.

The coffins varied; some were white, some brown, most draped with lace or fabric but almost all of them carried the corpses of children.

Sick of being in the glare of the world's media, many of the mourners lashed out at watching journalists. "Don't film for God's sake. We've been through enough," said one man.

A lust for revenge mingled with sorrow. "I promise you that I will take my revenge upon those who murdered you," a bearded man in black said aloud, throwing a small cellophane packet of earth into the grave of Timur Tsallagov, 35.

Elaborate floral wreaths were placed on the hastily prepared graves; "To my favourite Alinochka," read one.

Caucasian men wearing the region's oversized traditional flat caps filed past graves tossing handfuls of earth into the darkened holes while others waited till the graves had been filled in before pressing their palm prints into the soft earth while saying a prayer.

The headstones were simple, hewn from pine; some of the inscriptions were written in ballpoint pen.

Khasbi, a local grave digger, said: "Over 300 people will be buried here when we're finished. My own children are safe but I've never seen anything like this."

Earlier, traditional wakes were held in people's homes with neighbours going from door to door to pay their last respects, listen to funeral speeches and mourn.

People were then bussed to the cemetery, though some walked the last stretch carrying the wooden markers at the head of eerie processions along long straight, tree-lined avenues.

One girl in a black bandanna had to be helped after she lost her balance beside a relative's grave, overcome by grief.

A boy called David wandered among the freshly dug graves carrying a picture of his cousin, Alan, 15, who was shot in the back as he ran from the school.

A few metres away, an enormous double grave covered with dozens of red and white roses had been dug for two sisters; Alina and Ira Tetova, 12 and 13.

Many of the relatives confronted their demons by visiting the school where their loved ones had perished, which was opened to the public for the first time.

People knew what had happened inside the red-brick building was awful but what they found exceeded their worst fears.

A child's table in the school playground was particularly grim. Set up, apparently, as a warning of what would happen to anyone who tried something similar, it contained "terrorists' memorabilia". A blood-stained, charred jacket jostled for attention with a terrorist's jawbone - complete with one tooth - a scrap of beard and a selection of mortar shells, spent cartridges, gunmen's fingerless gloves and boxes of chocolates which the children had brought to celebrate the start of the school year.

The stench of decayed flesh was unbearable as locals gawped. Pointing to a tangled, blood-soaked mess of white lace curtains, a soldier said: "That is what a female suicide bomber blew herself up in." Another exhibit was simply labelled "fighter number three".

Inside the gymnasium, where many of the children had been kept, the scene was bleak. Black mulch clung to the hall's wooden floorboards while children's shoes lined the bombed-out windowsills.

The basketball hoops over which the terrorists had strung mines remained intact but not much else. The roof was almost destroyed, the gym bars blackened by explosives and the walls peppered with hundreds of bullet holes. A makeshift shrine had been erected in the centre of the hall.

Traditional Russian Orthodox icons sat beside bottles of water and packets of biscuits; a poignant reminder that the hostage-takers refused to accept food or drink for their captives.

Relatives of the dead wandered round the gym in a daze as locals explained what had happened where. One boy broke down in the hall, fell to his knees and started sobbing uncontrollably as he clutched a radiator while small candles flickered in the afternoon gloom.

The walls of almost every classroom were covered with bullet holes and blood was smeared on many walls showing where people had been executed or the terrorists themselves had been finished off.

All of the victims' bodies had been removed but some of the human remains of the terrorists had been left behind, deliberately.

A teenage boy played with the scalp of one in a wrecked classroom, picking it up with a cut of wood as his friends laughed in horror; the hairline was evident for all to see.

On the light blue, bullet-riddled wall behind him, the Russian alphabet glared down beside the multiplication tables. Half of the door to the school's chemistry lab was covered in blood and the thick ugly wallpaper in the school's staff room was punctured with too many bullet holes to count.

Children's paraphernalia was everywhere; exercise books, textbooks, paint sets and nametags thrown on the ground in a hurry and now surrounded by dripping water pipes, rubble and the smell of death.

A shattered globe sat on the windowsill in one classroom while in another the corner looked like someone had been executed there. The wall behind was marked with at least 30 different gunshots of different calibres, the wall smeared with blood and a bloody curtain lay on the ground.

In another room, which looked like a props room for school plays, black painted wooden replica Kalashnikov assault rifles were piled in a corner as if to mock the dead.

The school's library was a mess. Books and cupboards were piled against the windows to afford the terrorists more cover and a carefully crafted hole in the ground appeared to be the place where the hostage-takers had hidden their weapons weeks before they had struck.

The stench of urine in one classroom was overwhelming as a picture of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin stared out from a bullet-raked wall.

As locals and the curious wandered through the school's corridors, heavy rain fell, soaking textbooks and water logging corridors.

As they stumbled across evidence of fresh atrocities, they could not contain themselves. "Go f*** your mother," said one youth as he realised that the wall before him looked as if it had been sprayed with blood.

As the rain hammered through the bomb-blasted school's interior, one thing was constant; the wailing of grieving women outside.

- INDEPENDENT