"People exchanged bottles of urine and poured urine on the children to keep them cool," said another woman, Alla, 24, who was with her 6-year-old son, one of the first graders, who lay injured in the hospital. "They didn't allow people to get up."
The guerrillas spoke to the hostages mostly to taunt them. "Do you know why I cut my beard?" said the man the other guerrillas addressed as Colonel, according to Gurieva. "So I can pass your blockades."
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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"No one cares about you," said the man, who was wearing a traditional Chechen cap over military fatigues, and who Gurieva estimated was about 40. "Not your President. Not your government. You are not needed."
One of the guerrillas carried a video camera and "constantly filmed us," said Gurieva.
A brief moment of hope swept the crowd on Thursday when Ruslan Aushev, a former president of the Russian republic of Ingushetia, entered and said "We are doing our best for you." He was able to arrange the release of 25 people, including mothers with infants.
But desperation soon set in again. "I wrote a letter of goodbye to my mother," said Vika Guseinova, a teenager now barely conscious and lying on a gurney in the hallway of the intensive care unit in a hospital in Vladikavkaz.
Then, at 1 p.m. Friday came the explosion, and panic.
Within seconds, fire crept up the walls of the gym where plastic murals were hanging. Part of the roof began to collapse. Gunfire came from all directions, including from local vigilantes interspersed with Russian troops, and quickly, a second large explosion was set off as one of two large devices the terrorists had placed in the gym detonated.
Some of the hostage-takers began to fire at the hanging mines. The entire roof collapsed.
Gurieva, wounded and in a hospital bed, recalled the moment she left her daughter's body and her 14-year-old son, who was still breathing.
"I couldn't carry my son, and my daughter was dead," she said, crying for the first time in a long interview. She turned to her sister by her bedside. "I should have stayed," said Gurieva, who does not know where her two oldest children are. "I think I should have stayed."
Gurieva took her younger daughter and a niece to the cafeteria, where a guerrilla who followed them forced them into a corner. But when he fired a rocket-propelled grenade out the window, the recoil knocked him unconscious. Another guerrilla ran in and was shot as the group of hostages in the canteen, including the school's cook and gym teacher, scrambled out a window and into the arms of swarming Russian troops.
Galastyan lost her 30-year-old daughter, Anna, and her 10-year-old granddaughter, Satina, when the roof collapsed. "My daughter, her head fell on my shoulder. I screamed, 'Can you hear me? Can you hear me?' She didn't say anything." Her 9-year-old grandson, Misha Mkrtchan, survived.
She saw other hostages with their heads and legs torn off. Her nose was broken and she had burns on her stomach and arm. She was soaked in blood and had to push through bodies to get out. Blood pooled in her ears kept her from hearing, she said.
