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Row upon row of open graves
06/09/2004 15:23 - (SA)
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| The Russian flag flies at half-staff over Moscow's Kremlin. (Misha Japaridze, AP)
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Beslan, Russia - Cold drizzle fell from leaden skies and an elderly woman wailed "God, why did you take him so young?" The once-peaceful town of Beslan was one large funeral site on Monday as it buried its children.
"You won't find a soul here who is not attending a funeral today," said a young man standing in the burnt ruins of the school gymnasium where 1 000 were held hostage before their three-day ordeal came to a fiery, bloody end.
"No one close to me died, just friends of friends. But what does it matter? These were all our children, they were all our brothers and sisters."
In a narrow street nearby, five separate funeral services were being held simultaneously. At the Beslan cemetery, the murmur of gentle sobs was broken by sudden unrestrained shrieks of grief from men and women alike.
A human river flowed into the cemetery as procession after procession made its way to burial grounds that have been expanded to accommodate the flood of bodies that need to be laid to rest.
A local official said that 160 fresh graves had been dug at the cemetery and more than 100 of them were to be filled by day's end.
There were four rows of freshly-dug graves, each with a wooden stake nearby bearing the name of the victim to be laid inside, and as coffins were lowered into the earth in one area soldiers continued to dig graves in another.
At one point, voices began shouting for someone to call an ambulance after a person in one of the funeral processions collapsed.
With emotions raw here and throughout the region, interior ministry troops have been deployed in some areas in an effort to ensure that no further bloodshed takes place.
One of the soldiers who would identify himself only as Vitaly sat in a car at a checkpoint near the administrative border between North Ossetia and the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia and explained his presence.
'All our children'
"There is a lot of grief among the people, so anything is possible," he said. "We are here to prevent any possibility of another terrorist act and to prevent any public disorder."
So many people streamed into this small town for the funerals that police closed the main road leading into town, AFP journalists said.
Back at the school gymnasium, Isabella Koshtoya, a 15-year-old student who was among the hostages who survived, stood beside her mother as she revisited the scene of her nightmarish captivity.
"We were sitting right there," the girl said, pointing to a spot on the floor that had not been entirely charred or covered with debris and where traces of red paint that once marked the floor for games were still visible.
"A bomb exploded and we ran away, out through the window," she said.
Another woman who would not give her name wandered through the ruins of the school, sobbing.
"These were our kids," she said. "They were all our children."
- AFP
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