Barking orders, the guerrillas hustled the crowd into the gym. A number of people were shot in these first moments as they resisted or ran. The body of one man was dragged into the gym by his legs after most people were inside -- an example, the guerrillas said, according to survivors.
"Sit down, sit down," the guerrillas said in Chechen-accented Russian, according to survivors. None of the former hostages interviewed said they heard Arabic spoken, despite official accounts that Arabs were present. The survivors described a number of their captors as "Wahhabis," a reference to the Wahhabi sect of Islam originating in Saudi Arabia, because of their long beards and prayer caps. The fighters, including at least three women, were led by a man they addressed as Colonel who communicated by phone throughout the siege, witnesses said.
Family members comfort a woman who identified one of the slain hostages as her relative, at a morgue in Vladikavkaz, where survivors are being treated.
(Sergei Karpukhin -- Reuters)
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The space in the gym was so tight that people were literally piled on top of one another. Gurieva said one of the guerrillas told her that they had only expected to find about 300 or 400 people at the school.
Some of the hostages were wounded, many were hysterical, and babies in the crowd had already begun to wail. The guerrillas seized phones and cameras from the hostages and repeatedly screamed at the crowd to quiet the crying children.
The hostages were never sure how many guerrillas there were. One woman, about 50 years old, first appeared on the second day to shout at the crowd that it was time to pray. "They told us to pray to Allah," said Fatima Alikova, 27, a photographer who had gone to the school for the local newspaper. Two other veiled women, pistols tucked into the suicide-belts around their waists, disappeared after the first day, and were not seen again. Some in the crowd whispered that they had blown themselves up, Gurieva said.
Immediately, the guerrillas began building defenses. They set up two large explosive charges connected to a pedal mechanism beside the feet of two sitting guerrillas. They placed mines among the crowd and at entrances and announced that they would explode if touched. Five more mines were hung from a wire that was run between the basketball hoops and over the sitting crowd.
About 22 men were soon removed from the crowd and taken to classrooms. There they broke off the doors and pulled out the desks and chairs to build barricades around the gym and in an adjoining hallway. Those men never returned to the gym, witnesses said. Gurieva said that when she went to the bathroom with some children a couple of hours after the siege began, she saw them lined up with their hands behind their heads. The men were executed, according to Russian officials.
One of the terrorists taunted the hostages about the missing men. "Do you think 22 bodies is enough?" he said, according to Gurieva.
Tamara Galastyan, who was sitting with her daughter and two grandchildren, said she saw one man executed about an hour after the siege began. "They put a pistol to his head and killed him," she said. She said she also saw the body of another man who was killed early on the first day. "They shot one man right away. I just saw him lying on the ground."
Desperation Sets in
As the hours progressed, the heat in the unventilated gym became unbearable. Some children fainted, other vomited, and people began to strip to their underwear. "My grandson said, 'Raya, Raya, I'm so thirsty," said Raisa Tavaseyeva, whose 10-year-old grandson, Elbrus, uses a diminutive to address her.
Some of the elderly were dragged to a room off the gym as they began to fail. One 82-year-old veteran of World War II was ordered to turn his jacket inside out so that his war medals, which were put on for the ceremonial occasion of the school opening, were not showing.
There was no consistency in who got water; it depended on which guerrilla accompanied hostages to the bathroom. Some of the guerrillas forced hostages to crawl to the bathroom and then fired into the roof to hurry them back. Over the 52 hours of the siege, gunfire was frequent, most of it directed at the roof simply to scare the hostages, survivors said.
Conditions deteriorated by the hour. Gurieva was allowed to drink in the bathroom when she accompanied young children there, but many others were not even allowed to go. They were forced to soil themselves.
By the second day, people began to urinate in plastic bottles and then drink from them. "They gave us bottles like this," said Galastyan, pointing to a plastic soda bottle, "and the children had to piss in them and drink from them."
