Dramatic video footage of inside the school in Beslan during the siege has been aired on Russian television.
It shows adults and children packed into the school gymnasium as heavily-armed, masked men walk around the room.
Explosives, apparently wired and ready for use, lie on the floor while others are looped around basketball hoops at either end of the gym.
Russia’s NTV network, the first to broadcast the video clip, said it had been recorded by the hostage-takers.
The network did not explain how it obtained the pictures.
The footage shows hundreds of hostages crowded into the gym - many with hands above their heads.
We’ve been to the morgue 10 or 15 times and opened up all the body bags, but Timor is not there
Slava, looking for her nephew
They are still fully-clothed - although fanning themselves in the heat - suggesting the video was shot soon after the school was seized.
The camera zooms in on one hostage-taker, standing next to a young boy, with his boot on what NTV said was a book rigged with a detonator.
A woman hostage-taker, fully-clad in black dress and headscarf, is seen in the doorway holding a pistol.
There is also footage of blood on the floor, and a fire in another building on the school premises.
The BBC’s Steven Eke in Moscow says that for many families in Beslan this will be the last footage of their loved ones alive.
Did the kids take off their clothes because it was too hot or were they asked to do so?
:disgust:
How can one place a kid (who’s hands are on his head) near an explosive.
This is disgusting and crazy.
I don’t even know what to say. Mad.