06 September 2004	Monday	20 Rajab 1425

BESLAN, Sept 5: Mothers with tears flowing down their faces and fathers trying to hide their emotions buried their children and relatives on Sunday as the death toll from Russia's worst ever hostage crisis climbed by the hour.

Dozens of well-wishers laid red carnations and plastic bottles of water at the wreckage of School Number One, its charred remains a haunting memory to a three-day standoff that ended with a massacre in some of the most violent scenes in modern Russian history.

The water bottles were a stark symbol of how the children were left without water or food by captors who were reportedly demanding independence for separatist Chechnya.

Surviving students were allowed into the building for the first time o Sunday, one girl laying a flower on the shattered windowsill of her old classroom, another wiping away tears with her fists as she gingerly stepped through a shattered hall.

Casualty figures continued to swing wildly, with the official death toll standing at 335 people although a worker in the region's main morgue told AFP that it had already received 394 bodies from the disaster.

It seemed everyone in this mourning town of 40,000 was walking around with photos of lost relatives or friends in their breast pocket, showing them to every person who passed by, hoping against hope to locate their loved ones.

Meanwhile, coffins made their steady progress under grey clouds to a field excavators had freshly dug up for dozens of new graves. "People come here to pay their respects and then many will go to another funeral," said one resident. "Attending a funeral is sacred here.

This is nothing, there aren't many funerals today. Wait until tomorrow. The whole town will be paralyzed." "The whole world now knows this little town. It would have been better if no one knew where Beslan was," a man said softly during a funeral ceremony.

Amid a steady hum of wailing, the first dozen coffins were lowered into the ground and the Patriarch of Russia's Orthodox church, Alexy II, asked that a mass be held in every church across the country to remember the victims.

Amid a wave of attacks linked to Chechnya that have now killed hundreds in just over a week, President Vladimir Putin - who rose to power on a law and order ticket - vowed before the nation to toughen up security and admitted to 'weakness' in the past.

Addressing the nation on television a day after the school hostage-taking ended in carnage, Mr Putin on Saturday admitted failings by law-enforcement agencies and said he would act to bolster the country's security.

"We have shown weakness in the face of danger and the weak get beaten up," said the president, who had flown earlier to Beslan, where more than 1,000 people were taken hostage on Wednesday.

The interior minister of North Ossetia resigned within hours of Mr Putin's comments. Mr Putin, who despite tough talk and nearly half a decade of conflict in Chechnya has failed to rein in separatists or stop a spate of attacks across Russia, faces the most serious challenge of his four-and-a-half-year presidency.

The hostage drama ended in nightmarish scenes described by the press as the 'worst possible scenario,' with half-naked, bloodied children fleeing from the school and the mutilated bodies of the dead being rushed out on stretchers.

The assault was triggered by a series of unexplained explosions, during which the gym roof collapsed on the hostages below, killing and maiming scores of people. Security forces alleged the attack had been meticulously planned weeks before pupils returned to school on Wednesday after the summer vacation.

"We found a large amount of explosives and mines and their number says that this attack was planned in advance," the top local security official for the southern Russian region, Valery Andreyev, said. "The armaments were hidden on the school grounds."

Another official said the militants had posed as builders in July, and snuck in bombs, mines and rocket launchers with other weapons disguised as construction material.

Survivors told of the terror inside the gym, where they were forced to drink their own urine to avoid dehydration and to strip down to their underwear to cope with the stifling heat. But Friday's harrowing scenes were a grim reminder of a botched rescue attempt of hostages in a Moscow theatre in October 2002 in which 132 people were killed - most of them when security forces pumped a toxic gas into the building. -AFP