As the smoke cleared after Friday's gun battle, details began to emerge about how many terrorists seized the Beslan school, their identities and leaders. Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said Sunday that a total of 32 terrorists had seized the school and that the bodies of 30 -- several of them foreign citizens -- had been recovered. "We're talking about an entire international organization here," Fridinsky told Interfax. "Among the bandits there are Chechens, Ingush, Kazakhs, Arabs and Slavs." Whether the two militants not included in Fridinsky's body count had been detained or were still at large was not immediately clear.
| Apparently they got at least one of them... |
Rossia television aired footage of police showing one detainee bodies in an effort to identify dead terrorists, while Channel One television aired an interview Sunday night with a different male detainee who reportedly told police he was willing to talk as long as he did not have to face relatives of the hostages.
| So why isn't their whereabouts immediately clear? That's two, right? |
North Ossetian Interior Ministry spokesman Ismel Shaov told Itar-Tass on Sunday that three suspects had been detained, one of them a woman. It was unclear exactly how many women were among the terrorists. Police said they had recovered the heads of two female suicide bombers, decapitated when their explosives belts detonated. Fatima Alikova, a press photographer who was taking pictures on the first day of school when the terrorists seized the building, told Kommersant that she saw two women among the assailants. "On the first day these women went around and collected all the cellphones," Alikova said, Kommersant reported. "Then they disappeared somewhere, and I never saw them again." Gazeta reported that one of the women was arrested near the security forces' headquarters and before that had been spotted near the field hospital. |