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Date: 2015-10-07; view: 465.

WHAT HAPPENED IN BESLAN?

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By Robert Greenall

A week after the bloody climax of the siege at a school in North Ossetia, where more than 1,000 children, teachers and parents were taken hostage, investigators are still piecing together what happened.

On Wednesday, Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov gave President Vladimir Putin his account of the events on 1 September. He said the hostage-takers assembled in a forest immediately before the attack on the school and headed for Beslan in a lorry and two jeeps. At that stage, the target of the attack may not have been decided, he said. The attackers were stopped in the early morning by a policeman, named as Major Sultan Gurazhev, whom they forced to the ground, disarmed and then took hostage. Major Gurazhev was later to flee when the school was stormed, and survived.

The group then drove into the school compound, where they surrounded more than 1,200 children, parents and teachers gathered there to mark the first day of the new school year. Mr Ustinov said the militants then moved their weapons and explosives into the school. This appears to contradict previous accounts suggesting most of the munitions had been hidden in the school in advance. At this point, the official account says, the group's leader - known as the Colonel - shot dead one rebellious hostage-taker who objected to schoolchildren being targeted. He later killed the two female bombers by using a remote-control device to detonate the explosives attached to their bodies. This version of events was apparently confirmed by surviving hostages and the one hostage-taker who was captured alive, 24-year-old Nur-Pashi Kulayev from Chechnya.