‘Bandits behave like beasts’

But hours after the storming, a top security official said some children were still being held and fresh explosions were heard in the area. An unknown number of the hostage-takers fled but officials said later three had been captured alive.

Interfax news agency said that security forces had killed 20 of the gunmen, including 10 Arabs, adding fuel to Russia’s contention that Chechen rebels are backed by foreign Islamic militants. The hostage-takers were believed to number about 40. Some officials suggested an Al Qaeda financing link to the gunmen.

Alexander Dzasokhov, President of North Ossetia, said the gunmen had demanded an independent Chechnya, the first clear link between them and a decade-long separatist rebellion in the neighbouring province.

Earlier, Dzasokhov had told fearful parents: ‘‘Forcible action is absolutely unacceptable…But I must tell you that if the bandits, God forbid, behave like real beasts, not only the special services, but others will lose patience.’’

The scene at the school complex was played out on TV screens as the world watched, transfixed in horror: burly soldiers grabbed the fleeing children and rushed them to waiting medics, some with blood streaming from wounds, others too traumatised to even walk. The children, many stripped to their underwear after two days without food or drink in stiflingly hot and crowded conditions, gulped down bottles of water and waited in a daze for relatives as gunfire crackled round them.

Witnesses saw about 20 dead children at a hospital morgue and British ITN television reporter Julian Manyon said his cameraman counted about 100 bodies in the smouldering gym of the school in Beslan, in the North Ossetia region next to Chechnya.

‘‘The number of those killed in the terrorist act in Beslan could be far more than 150,’’ Aslambek Aslakhanov, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin, told reporters.

Russian authorities said they had been forced into an unplanned rescue operation when the hostage-takers opened fire on fleeing children.

Moments before the battle erupted, officials said they sent a vehicle to fetch the bodies of people killed in Wednesday’s seizure of the school.

‘‘No military action was planned. We were planning further talks,” the regional head of Russia’s FSB security service, Valery Andreyev, told RTR television.

A North Ossetian Interior Ministry source told Interfax the gunmen had split into three groups. About five had stayed in the school while a larger group had tried to break out of the town, and others had tried to merge with the hostages. Russian media said 860 pupils attended Middle School No.1. Their number would have been swollen by parents and relatives attending a first-day ceremony traditional in Russian schools.—(Reuters)