BESLAN, Russia, Sept. 4 -- The broken bodies of hundreds of children were pulled from the rubble of this bereaved town's School No. 1 on Saturday, pushing the death toll well above 300 in an attack that President Vladimir Putin denounced as an "inhuman, unprecedentedly cruel" terrorist crime.
Angry relatives searched in vain to identify their loved ones at morgues. But a day after a 52-hour hostage standoff at the school in southern Russia culminated in a bloody battle, they found corpses burned beyond recognition by an explosion that had crumpled the roof over the school gym.
"We've been trying to give them hope," said Emma Kusova, after she added one more name to the list of at least 260 missing Saturday night. "But none of these people are alive."
Putin said the attack on the school, which began Wednesday morning as students and their parents arrived for the first day of classes, constituted "direct intervention of international terrorism against Russia." He harshly criticized the security services and promised a forceful response. "We showed weakness, and the weak are trampled upon," Putin said.
Officials reported more than 340 dead and about 700 wounded by late Saturday. But authorities acknowledged there had been close to 1,200 hostages, and the death toll could still rise substantially. A large percentage of the victims were children.
Russian officials described the school seizure in the North Ossetia region as a carefully planned operation in which the attackers had secretly planted weapons and explosives inside the building in advance. "The rebels prepared beforehand," said Valery Andreyev, head of the regional Federal Security Service.
But few details emerged about the guerrillas, described by officials as a mix of ethnic Chechens, Ingush, Russians and Arabs, and there were conflicting reports about whether any of the attackers survived and escaped.
Putin, wearing a somber black suit and tie, spoke in a videotaped address to the nation from the Kremlin 13 hours after making a surprise pre-dawn visit to Beslan. He blasted Russia's security services for corruption and for allowing the country's borders to go unprotected. But he did not mention Chechnya, or talk about the years-long war in the separatist republic that has given rise to a campaign of terror around the country.
Instead, Putin blamed international terrorists for the wave of attacks that has killed hundreds of civilians over the last year. Government officials said that 10 of the 26 guerrillas killed in Beslan were Arabs. Meanwhile, a Muslim group declaring loyalty to al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri took credit for the school seizure in a Web statement.
"We are dealing with direct intervention of international terrorism against Russia," Putin said, "with a total, cruel and full-scale war in which our compatriots die again and again."
In Beslan, recriminations were directed not only at the heavily armed insurgents who stormed into the school demanding an end to the war in nearby Chechnya, but also at the president who rose to power based on his vow to harshly prosecute that war.
"What happened is the fault of the president, only his," said Bibo Dzudtsev as he stood outside the House of Culture where families held a vigil during the crisis. Like many in the crowd searching for missing loved ones and for answers, Dzudtsev said he believed Putin's government lied throughout the school seizure. "Everyone is deceiving us. They're telling us there were Arabs. There were no Arabs. They were lying about the number of hostages. And now they're lying about the number of dead."
Up until Friday's battle, authorities had said there were 350 hostages in the school, though many in Beslan had already concluded that the real number was closer to 1,200. Now that the worst had happened, the anguished people of this town expressed anger once more, because the official death toll was far lower than the estimated 500 most believed had perished.
Regional leader Alexander Dzasokhov appeared to suggest that townspeople were right to complain they had not been told the truth. "Now it is our duty to tell the people here the truth, to show what really happened," Dzasokhov, the president of North Ossetia, told Putin during his early-morning visit to Beslan.
