Weapons possibly hidden in school long before siege

By Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post

MIKHAIL KLEMENTIEV / AP An emergency worker looks through debris in the gymnasium of a school in Beslan, Russia, where attackers had held more than 1,000 people captive. More than 340 people, at least half of them children, died, many when an explosion brought down the gym roof.

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BESLAN, Russia — Attackers who seized more than 1,000 hostages in a provincial school might have smuggled in a large cache of weapons, possibly disguised as construction equipment, in the weeks before the siege, Russian officials said yesterday as the death toll rose above 340, at least half of them children.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a nationally televised address, called the hostage standoff that ended in a nightmare of explosions and gunfire Friday "an act unprecedented in its inhumanness and cruelty" and "an attack against our country."

Yesterday, authorities laid out 26 bodies of hostage-takers in the schoolyard. Authorities believe they are linked to rebels from Chechnya, the nearby republic that has been engaged in a separatist war with Russian forces for most of the past 10 years, or neighboring Ingushetia, where rebel violence also has broken out. Russian officials said 10 of the fighters were Arabs but provided no proof.

Russians publicly have linked the school seizure to notorious Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, an Islamic radical who is believed to have masterminded a series of suicide bombings against Russia over the past several years.

Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, elected Chechnya's president during its brief period of autonomy in the mid-1990s, strongly condemned the hostage seizure yesterday.

As authorities struggled to understand how the relatively few hostage-takers could have mounted a furious gunbattle with elite Russian "spetznaz" commandos that lasted nearly 10 hours, a Federal Security Service official said investigators think the attackers might have sneaked in weaponry before the siege.

"Part of the weapons and ammunition were brought in and hidden in advance on the territory of the school where the terrorist act took place — we are carefully looking at this possibility," said Sergei Andreyev, head of the bureau's office in the republic of North Ossetia, where the attack occurred.

The question of how the attackers managed to bring in so much firepower has troubled investigators from the beginning. With several former hostages now reporting that they were forced to dig up the floor at the school to unveil a cache of weapons underneath, suspicion turned to remodeling at the school over the summer.

A worker who entered the building after the siege ended also reported that he saw false-fronted walls, once covered in temporary stucco, that were gouged out during the standoff to serve as sheltered firing positions.

Deputy North Ossetian prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky said authorities have not linked the hostage seizure and the reconstruction contract "in any way," but Lev Dzudayev, an aide to the North Ossetian president, said investigators think the hostage-takers would not have been able to quickly carry in the amount of weaponry and ammunition deployed in Friday's firefight.

Despite earlier reports that three hostage-takers had been captured and another four might have escaped, Fridinsky said 26 guerrillas had been killed and none remained at large. "We think that not a single person managed to escape," he said.

	Putin

However, groups of special forces troops patrolled Beslan searching for possible escapees and Putin ordered the borders to North Ossetia closed while the hunt continued.

In one residential neighborhood, a squad of soldiers knocked on doors and stopped passers-by. They forced one woman to take off her sweater, saying they wanted to examine her shoulders.

Asked why, they said they were searching for a woman terrorist, who was reported to have been wounded and would have a bruise from a rifle butt.

The broken bodies of scores of children were pulled from the rubble of School No. 1 yesterday as angry relatives searched in vain to identify their loved ones at morgues. Instead they found corpses burned beyond recognition by an explosion that had crumpled the roof over the school gym.

"We've been trying to give them hope," said Emma Kusova, after she added one more name to the list of at least 260 missing last night. "But none of these people are alive."

In Beslan, recriminations were directed not only at the heavily armed insurgents who stormed into the school demanding an end to the war in nearby Chechnya but also at Putin, who rose to power based on his vow to harshly prosecute that war.

"What happened is the fault of the president, only his," said Bibo Dzudtsev as he stood outside the House of Culture, where families held a vigil during the crisis.

Like many in the crowd searching for missing loved ones and for answers, Dzudtsev said he believed Putin's government lied throughout the school seizure.

"Everyone is deceiving us," he said. "They're telling us there were Arabs. There were no Arabs. They were lying about the number of hostages. And now they're lying about the number of dead."

North Ossetia President Alexander Dzasokhov appeared to suggest that townspeople were right to complain that they had not been told the truth.

"Now it is our duty to tell the people here the truth, to show what really happened," Dzasokhov told Putin during Putin's early morning visit to Beslan yesterday.

But Dzasokhov and other local officials were shouted down when they tried to reassure residents.

"We'll do everything we can," the regional finance minister told the crowd at the House of Culture.

But he was drowned out by shouts of "We haven't found our relatives," "How could the terrorists get through all the checkpoints? Is the president going to resign?"

Another politician also sought to calm the crowd. "Let's just concentrate on burying the dead," he said.

At the main morgue in the nearby city of Vladikavkaz, about 150 unclaimed corpses were stacked in corridors and some were outside in the parking lot late yesterday. Many had been so badly burned that they could not be recognized. Many were the bodies of small children.

Relatives wandered in the rows of bodies, some of which were in black body bags, others wrapped in foil or plastic. Those walking there wore masks or pulled shirts above their noses to block the smell of death.

People who found their loved ones put them in caskets and took them away; others kept searching. The sound of wailing periodically erupted in the otherwise silent ranks.

Zarina and Zhanna Basayeva waited outside while their brothers searched for their missing 9-year-old niece. They'd already found a dead cousin and had been back and forth between the hospital and the morgue several times.

"Our brothers go in, look around and don't find her, and we get all hopeful," said Zarina. They wiped their eyes and headed off again, but did not look very hopeful.

Pages of names posted at Beslan's hospital suggested there were still survivors to be found. Each of the 543 entries documented one of the injured, along with a description.

Among those injured were children shot from behind when they fled as the guerrillas started firing, witnesses said.

Many of the injured were listed simply as "unknown," such as No. 32 on one of the lists: "Unknown, approximately 14 years old. Diagnosis: Multiple shrapnel wounds to the body and head. Burns. Shock."

There were a few happy reunions on an otherwise grim day. One group of children was found alive yesterday morning, hiding in the basement of the school where they had fled at the start of the fighting.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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