BESLAN, Russia – Trains passing a cemetery blew their horns in respect Monday as Russia mourned the hundreds of victims of what increasingly appeared to have been a well-planned terrorist attack on a southern school. State television sharply criticized government officials for understating the scope of the crisis.
Residents of Beslan crowded around the coffins of children, parents, grandparents and teachers ahead of 120 scheduled burials during the first of two national days of mourning in Russia, which has seen more than 400 people killed in violence linked to terrorism in the past two weeks.
Other desperate families searched for the missing from the siege at School No. 1, which began Wednesday and ended Friday, 62 hours later, in explosions and shooting. Foreign planes delivered medical supplies to this grief-stricken southern region neighboring Chechnya.
The official death toll stood Monday at 335, plus 30 attackers, who had been heavily armed with weapons and explosives and had reportedly demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. The regional health ministry said 326 of the dead had been hostages, and the Emergency Situations Ministry said 156 of the dead were children.
A Russian prosecutor said the hostage-takers belonged to a cell formed by radical Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, the Interfax news agency reported.
Mikhail Lapotnikov, a senior investigator in the North Caucasus prosecutors’ office, said the investigation had established that the group had taken part in the June attack targeting police and security officials in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, Interfax said. Eighty-eight people were killed in that raid, which was also blamed on Basayev.
Criticism of the government response to the tragedy was mounting, with even Russian state television chiding officials for understating the magnitude of the crisis, for their slowness to admit that previous recent attacks were by terrorists and for their apparent paralysis.
“At such moments, society needs the truth,” Rossiya television commentator Sergei Brilyov said Sunday night.
The criticism, which was almost certainly sanctioned by the Kremlin, stopped short of the president himself.
Brilyov blamed the “system of administration,” where “everything hangs on the bravery of the rank and file, but generals can’t bring themselves to act until the president throws ideas to them.” On Saturday, President Vladimir Putin had criticized Russia’s law enforcement agencies for failing to rise to the challenge of terrorism.
The Federal Security Service chief in North Ossetia, Valery Andreyev, has said investigators were looking into whether militants had smuggled the explosives and weapons into the school and hidden them during summer renovations.
Among the first to be buried in Beslan were Zinaida Kudziyeva, 42, and her 10-year-old daughter, Madina Tomayeva. Relatives said the two had tried to flee the school when the first explosions went off and found themselves in the line of fire between the militants and Russian forces.
“They couldn’t run away. They didn’t have time,” said Irakly Khosulev, a relative from nearby Vladikavkaz. “Someone should answer for this.”
Trains passing the cemetery stopped and blew their horns in a show of respect.
Police erected heavy security cordons on the road leading to the cemetery, checking cars and identification papers in advance of a visit by a high-level government delegation, including Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, North Ossetian President Alexander Dzasokhov, parliament speaker Boris Gryzlov, and Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov. The dignitaries stood on a stage draped in red and black and addressed a small crowd through loudspeakers.
One woman approached the stage and shouted angrily at them to turn off the loudspeakers. A group of men hustled her and reporters attempting to speak with her away from the stage.
Two politicians _ liberal Irina Khakamada and nationalist Sergei Glazyev _ called separately Monday for an independent investigation, the Interfax news agency reported.
Khakamada said two questions had to be addressed: whether the authorities had prior information about planned terrorist attacks, and what the government was doing to stabilize the situation in Chechnya.
The school tragedy left few families untouched in this tight-knit, mostly industrial town, whose population of 30,000 belies a village atmosphere in which many leave their doors unlocked. Most people in Beslan had a relative, friend or neighbor killed or wounded.
More than 700 people needed medical help after the crisis. The North Ossetian health ministry said 411 remained hospitalized, 214 of them children. Twenty-three of the most badly injured patients were in Moscow and 11 in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.
As of Sunday, around 100 people were unaccounted for, the Interior Ministry said. Russian media speculated that some of the missing could be wounded victims who were brought to various hospitals unconscious or too deep in shock to identify themselves. Also, many of the dead have not been identified, with some bodies charred beyond recognition; the ITAR-Tass news agency said Monday that about 60 would need DNA analysis for examination.
A plane delivered antibiotics, bandages and other medical supplies from Italy on Sunday, and two U.S. transport planes delivered aid Monday.
Many residents expressed doubt over the government accounts of the tragedy’s magnitude, a skepticism stoked by severe initial understatements by officials of the number of hostages, which a regional spokesman acknowledged Saturday to have exceeded 1,100.
Questions also swirled about the identity of the hostage-takers _ state-controlled Channel One television, without citing a source, said Sunday the attackers included Kazakhs, Chechens, Arabs, Ingush and Slavs.
North Ossetia’s Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said Saturday that 35 attackers were killed. However, Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said Sunday that according to the latest information, 32 terrorists had been involved and the bodies of 30 of them had been found, Interfax reported.
Three suspects were detained Saturday in Beslan, Interfax reported, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, and Channel One showed an unidentified man that Fridinsky said was among the attackers. Fridinsky said the man, who spoke accented Russian, would be charged and that he was giving useful evidence.
The Gazeta.ru Web site identified the detainee as 24-year-old Nur-Pashi Kulayev from Chechnya, and said his brother and three other men from his village had been among the attackers. The Web site said a second detained attacker was hospitalized in Vladikavkaz.
It identified another of the attackers as a Ukrainian native named Anatoly Khodov. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry on Monday denied the allegation.
Interfax said the alleged leader of the terrorists, an ethnic Ingush named Magomed Yevloyev, had not been found among the dead. Yevloyev is believed to be the leader of the strict Wahhabi sect of Muslims in Ingushetia.
