Detainee Nurpasha Kulayev, suspected of involvement in the hostage taking, pleaded guilty. He says, however, that he was gang member but did not make a single shot, and there were no lives on his conscience.
Kulayev was seized after commandos finished their school storm, when an exasperated crowd was in search of terrorists. The police and media warned the population the bandits were at large in civilian clothing. The enraged crowd thought an alien accent was enough to identify their prey. One man, later presumed innocent, was brutally lynched on the spot. Three captured men were totally innocent local dwellers of the Ingush stock. One of them, a stevedore, was deaf-mute.
Kulayev, wearing a tracksuit, was found crouching under a parked lorry. Out of his wits with horror, he was muttering: "Leave me alone! I must live!" When questioned, he said he had come to Ossetia after his elder brother, Khanpasha, who led the gang. Nurpasha acknowledged he had been for several years with notorious warlord Shamil Basayev's gang. He assumes he had not the slightest idea of what his brother's gang was to do in Beslan. He identified Khanpasha and his several fellow-villagers among the killed terrorists. It was hard to identify the others.
Tragedy survivors say there were 32 attackers or even fewer. As far as investigators know from Nurpasha Kulayev's statement and agent information, gang chieftains were addressed by the aliases Colonel and Magas. Detectives are working to track Colonel's real name.
Magas was on the "wanted" list with several dozen terror acts in which he had been involved in Chechnya and the neighbouring Ingushetia. According to Kulayev, the chieftain found his death as soon as the terror act started. He got a pistol shot point-blank from a school security policeman while leaping out of the lorry by which the gang came to the site.
Investigators tracked down almost all terrorist weapons to police arsenals in Ingushetia, where they were seized in a terror act in the small hours of June 22. Found in the school were 31 Kalashnikov assault rifles, three machine-guns, several flame- and grenade-throwers, and a rocket launcher, say North Osset Interior Ministry PR.
The terrorists had eight cameras with them, which they placed outside the school to watch every possible direction on which they could be attacked. The cameras were casting to a television in the teachers' common room, where the bandits put a control board to blast the biggest mines planted all over the premises. Experts are not sure whether the fatal blast was ordered, or the mines detonated with an accidental explosion. Only one blood-curdling detail is known for sure-the suicide girls in the gang blasted of their own free will even before commandos went into attack as one of the women triggered off a suicide bomb belt she was wearing. All mutilated female bodies were in one room.
Some of the gang's explosive devices were home-made, others came from factories. Judging by the damage, the mines and bombs were about five kilograms in TNT equivalent, say pyrotechnical experts.
"The blast was strong enough to kill all in the gym, but the terrorists had smashed every window as they expected a gas attack, like in the 'Nord-Ost', so the blast wave partly came outside, and many hostages survived," said one of the experts. He was referring to a heinous terror act in Moscow, October 2002, when a full house and cast were taken hostage during a sensational musical at a theatre in Dubrovka Street. Commandos used a strong sleeping gas to seize the terrorists.
