Survivor's stories

ASLAN Zaratsov was one of the lucky ones.

The 14-year-old was alive to tell the story of how he managed to escape from the gymnasium where so many of his schoolmates, teachers, parents and friends were killed as the Beslan school siege reached its bloody climax yesterday afternoon.

The teenager was lying on the floor of the gymnasium - hungry, thirsty and without sleep for almost three days - when the first explosion went off.

He was hit by shrapnel from the blast and then knocked to the ground by the force of a second blast in the confined space of the hall.

"We didn’t know if we were going to live," he said afterwards.

Seconds later, he joined other dazed and confused hostages as they ran for their lives out of the building, with gunfire crackling around them and smoke filling the air.

Others were carried out by Russian soldiers who risked their lives to dash in to the battle scene and grab those unable to run.

After more than two days trapped inside the gymnasium in suffocating heat, Aslan, like many others, was severely dehydrated and had stripped down to his underclothes.

A young boy, who was clearly distraught, said: "Many, many dead. Many dead children."

The boy said he had been "blown out of the window by an explosion".

He did not appear injured, but a Washington Post reporter observed four dead children and a dead adult close by him.

A local man, Teimuraz Kanukov, who was helping the emergency services, said he had shuttled six times between the school and the hospital ferrying hostages, three wounded, three dead. His shirt was soaked with blood.

"These were children," he said, "shot in the head."

Eight of his own relatives were among the hostages, he said, before heading back toward the school.

In the gym, Alan Karayev, a volunteer who entered to help bring out the bodies, saw a gruesome scene.

"The whole floor is covered in bodies," he said, estimating there were hundreds of dead children.

"There is no ceiling at all. The roof all fell down on the children."

An ITN camera crew which entered the school gymnasium soon after most of the fighting had subsided witnessed the carnage that the teenager had managed to survive.

Julian Manyon, a reporter for ITV television news, reported there were more than 100 bodies. "There were a large number of corpses lying on the smouldering floor."

He said it appeared explosive charges laid by the attackers had been detonated.

"The firefighters have been in there to try and put the flames out," Mr Manyon said.

"I wasn't able to get through the door. I was stopped by the Russian soldiers.

"But our cameraman ... did manage to get through the door just for a few moments. He told me that in his estimation there are as many as 100 dead bodies, I am afraid, lying on the smouldering floor of the gymnasium, where we know that a large number of the hostages were being held."

Those who managed to make it safely outside described the scenes of horror inside the gymnasium during the three-day siege.

One said there were 28 militants, including women in camouflage.

The hostage, who identified himself only as Teimuraz, said the militants began wiring the school with explosives as soon as they took control on Wednesday.

"They didn’t let me go to the toilet for three days, not once. They never let me drink or go to the toilet," he said.

Another escaped hostage, a boy who looked pale and in distress, was so shocked at his release he was unable to recognise his own parents.

One unidentified woman said that, during the night, children occasionally began to cry.

"Then the fighters would fire in the air to restore quiet. In the morning they told us they would not give us anything more to drink because the authorities were not ready to negotiate," she said.

Rita Gadzhinova, a physics teacher, was freed by the gang on Thursday along with her three-year-old daughter, Madina, but was not allowed to take out her other two daughters, aged 11 and 14.

She described how the gang had seized the school in a matter of minutes.

The attackers herded their captives into the gym, where they planted two big bombs in the two basketball hoops and laid cables leading to other, smaller, charges across the floor, said Ms Gadzhinova.

Asked to describe them, she said they had never removed their masks and always talked in a whisper, speaking in Russian with Chechen or Ingush accents. She said she could not tell how many of them there were.

They would fire into the ceiling to frighten their captives but did not abuse anyone, she said.

However, men among the hostages were periodically put up against windows as human shields, the teacher added.

"The youngest children were very frightened but they behaved with great discipline, though they often asked to go to the toilet because of their fear," she said.

"They were marched to the toilet and if the toddlers started to cry, the fighters would fire blanks in the air and shout for them to keep quiet."

When a group of men were separated from the rest on the first day, Yury Ailarov, a father who had accompanied his daughter to school, escaped by jumping out of the second-floor window, suffering two broken arms and a concussion.

The hostage-takers, apparently not wanting to shoot at him from the windows because it would expose them to sniper fire, threw grenades out of the window at him. Seeing what was happening, troops outside the school threw smoke grenades to provide cover and pulled him to safety.

It was a good decision.

Fellow hostage Zalina Dzandarova, 27, said that two groups of men had been killed by women suicide bombers, who blew themselves up in a corridor of the school on the first day of the siege.

"The men terrorists told us afterwards that their sisters had conquered," she said.

"If a child utters even a sound, we’ll kill another one," a rebel warned, as the corpse of a man just shot dead was held up in front of terrified hostages at the Russian school.

When hostages fainted from lack of sleep, food and water, their masked and camouflaged captors, pockets stuffed with ammunition and grenades, sneered at them.

In the intolerable heat of the gym, adults implored children to drink their own urine.

"They’re not human beings," said one woman taken hostage with her seven-year-old son and mother.

"What they did to us, I can’t understand."

With smoke still filling the air and the battle between the terrorists and security forces still raging, about two dozen schoolchildren lay on bloodied stretchers in a grove of pine and spruce trees adjacent to the school site. Nearby, more children lay on bloodied stretchers trying to make sense of the mayhem that had just erupted.

Parents and relatives hugged and kissed them, giving them water.

One weeping man led away a young boy muddied, bleeding and wearing only underpants.

A woman in a pink dress, worn for the traditional festivities on the first day of school - the day the rebels seized the building - collapsed in a faint as she ran away and was bundled on to a khaki stretcher by military paramedics.

Dazed girls were still wearing decorative white hair bands and ribbons in their hair, their first day of school now a nightmarish memory.

Many parents and relatives were still left with uncertainty.

"My friend is a teacher at the school but since the assault we have heard nothing about her … We are going from hospital to hospital looking for her," said one man.

Ruslan Pukhayev said his seven-year-old grandson Gennady was slightly wounded in the left shoulder by an explosion.

The boy sat on a stretcher dipping a biscuit into some warm, sweet tea. The grandfather hovered above him.

"It’s incredible. Of course it’s amazing," the old man said.

"The whole thing is horrible for him. The whole thing happened before his very eyes. It will be years before he understands it. My God, who needed this?"

Bodies were seen lying outside a hospital morgue.

"I can see 23 bodies lying outside the hospital morgue, six of them are in uniform and 17 are children," said Reuters correspondent Richard Ayton.

One woman leaned down to a young boy, hugging and caressing the youth, who shared a stretcher with another body.

Other women stood shocked, holding their hands to their mouths and weeping.