crazygirl
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At Least 180 Still Missing After Violence That Ended Standoff....
BESLAN, Russia (Sept. 5) - Wails of mourning echoed through the streets of this southern Russian town on Sunday, and the region's top police officer offered his resignation in the wake of the school hostage-taking that left at least 350 people dead.
Families were beginning the first of what will be a long and wrenching series of funerals - with the death toll still unsure and liable to rise. Some 180 people remained missing after the chaos that ended the standoff at the school. At the same time, many bodies remained unidentified, and it was unclear whether some of the missing were among the unnamed dead.
The number of dead forced a dramatic expansion of the cemetery in the industrial town of 30,000. Dozens of men dug graves in a football field-sized tract next to the cemetery Sunday morning, while surveyors across the road marked out new plots with wooden stakes and string.
A shaken President Vladimir Putin went on national television Saturday to make a rare admission of Russian weakness in the face of an ''all-out war'' by terrorists. He told the Russian people that they must mobilize against terrorism and promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and root out corruption.
''We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten,'' he said in an address aimed at addressing the grief, shock and anger felt by many after a string of terrorist attacks that have killed some 450 people in the past two weeks, apparently in connection with the war in Chechnya.
As a light rain fell, funeral processions snaked through the streets of Beslan on the way to the cemetery. Weeping mourners placed flowers and wreaths at the graves, including one where two sisters were being laid to rest together.
At the school at the center of the tragedy, window sills were strewn with red and pink roses, and abandoned children's shoes littered the floor. People clutched photos of their relatives whom they had not found among either the living or the dead.
Coffin lids stood outside the entrances to apartment buildings, and wailing could be heard from courtyards where families were cutting up meat for ritual meals.
''I lost my boy,'' cried Svetlana Debloyeva, 42, whose rounds of hospitals and morgues have turned up no sign of her 11-year-old son Zaur. The two became separated during the chaotic, bloody end of the hostage crisis.
The regional health ministry said 180 people were missing after the three-day hostage crisis, which ended in a bloody wave of explosions and gunfire Friday when militants set off bombs rigged in the school gymnasium and commandos stormed the building.
Russian media speculated that some of the missing could be among the wounded who were brought to various hospitals in the southern Russian region, unconscious or in too deep a state of shock to be able to identify themselves.
Also, many of the dead still had not been identified. The Interfax news agency said 184 bodies had been matched with names by mid-afternoon Sunday.
There were conflicting official reports of the death toll - in part because of the large number of body fragments collected at the school. A duty officer at the North Ossetian health ministry said Sunday that 350 victims had been killed, but the region's deputy health minister, Taimuraz Revazov, later said only 324 were confirmed dead. Interfax quoted North Ossetian government spokesman Lev Dzugayev as saying the toll stood at 338.
More than 540 people were wounded - mostly children. Medical officials said 423 people remained hospitalized Sunday, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.