BESLAN, Sept 3: Sobs broke out during a minute of silence on Sunday marking the precise moment two years ago when a vicious firefight broke out between hostage takers and federal troops at Beslan’s School Number One, leading to 332 deaths.

The tear-filled silence at 1:05pm was followed by schoolchildren releasing 332 white balloons in the yard beside the ruined school, one for each victim of the bloody hostage crisis.

Just as the balloons were released, a wind picked up and swept half of them into the branches of trees bordering the schoolyard.

The gathering of about 3,000 local residents — with nearly as many police standing watch — was the culmination of a three-day memorial marking the September 1-3, 2004 crisis, when gunmen took over 1,000 people hostage in this school in southern Russia’s turbulent North Caucasus region.

The weekend’s final commemoration was a memorial concert planned to take place in the nearby regional capital of Vladikavkaz, where prominent Russian artistes were to perform works written for the occasion.

Before the moment of silence, Beslan residents’ conversations showed how immediate the crisis still was for them.

Some discussed a proposal to build a Russian Orthodox chapel on the site of the charred and ruined gymnasium where the hostages were held.

Beslan Mothers’ Committee representative Susana Dudayeva said she strongly opposed the idea.

“Let them build a chapel in the yard or somewhere else, but I don’t want them to destroy the gymnasium to do it,” Dudayeva told AFP. “It’s hard for us to come here, but we need to be able to do it.”

Many others were discussing an independent report on the crisis released last week by Russian State Duma Deputy Yury Savelyev, a dissenting member of the official parliamentary commission assigned to investigate the events.

Savelyev charges in his report that the violent denouement of the crisis was brought on by a grenade that struck the school from outside, rather than by an explosion set off inside by the hostage takers, as the official version maintains.

“It’s what we always knew — finally a specialist has shown it scientifically,” Elbrus Tedtov, whose son died in the shootout, told AFP.

“Beslan has been talking about it for a long time. Finally someone wrote it down,” he said.

Speaking at a ceremony in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, Russian President Vladimir Putin mourned what he called the ‘monstrous terrorist crime in Beslan’.

“The murder of utterly innocent women and children shocked not only our nation, but the entire world,” Putin said.

“This tragedy, the inconsolable grief of parents who have lost the most valuable thing — their children — will always be our common pain.”

—AFP