The explosions that sparked the bloody end to last September's school hostage seizure in Beslan were touched off when sharpshooters killed two militants holding triggers to homemade bombs, a suspect being tried for the massacre has testified. The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Nur-Pashi Kulayev as saying the leader of the 32 heavily armed militants - whom he called "Colonel" - entered the packed gymnasium where more than 1100 hostages were held after the bombs detonated and smashed his cellphone. "He said: 'They won't take pity on anyone; we fight to the last cartridge'," Kulayev was quoted as saying as he recounted the last words of the Colonel, who was killed at the school. Kulayev's testimony provides new insights into the September 1 to 3 raid on Beslan's School No 1. Of the schoolchildren, relatives and teachers held hostage, more than 330 died during the fierce gunbattle and explosions that Russian security agencies said were caused by the terrorists. More than half of the dead were children. Kulayev was the only militant known to have survived. Kulayev, whose trial at the North Ossetian Supreme Court in May, has pleaded innocent to charges including terrorism, murder and attacking law enforcement officers. If convicted, he could get up to life in prison, though survivors and others have called for the death penalty.
Video footage shot by the militants has corroborated witnesses' accounts of how the militants strung homemade explosives from the ceiling and the basketball hoops in the school's gymnasium. Some witnesses said the terrorists had rigged up triggers that would set off the bombs if a person's foot was lifted from them. Kulayev told the court of some of the arguments that broke out among the hostage-takers. Some apparently objected to taking children hostage, and several wanted to seize the nearby police station. "The children and women were captured and forced into the school building. Then the militants started shouting: 'The police station is nearby, let's seize it, why seize the school?'," Kulayev was quoted as saying. Two of the militants were female suicide bombers who openly disagreed with the Colonel about the child hostages and were killed when he detonated their bombs by remote control, Kulayev testified.
Kulayev was quoted as saying that he spent the entire time in the school's cafeteria, armed with an assault rifle, which he said he never fired. He also said a police officer rode in the cabin of the truck that carried the militants to the school, and that was how they were able to enter Beslan so easily. He said the officer disappeared after the raid began.