Dozens of well-wishers Sept. 5 laid red carnations and plastic bottles of water at the wreckage of School No. 1, its charred remains a haunting memory to the three-day standoff that started Sept. 1 when some 30 Chechen separatists took more than 1,000 pupils, parents and teachers hostage, and ended Sept. 3 with a massacre in some of the most violent scenes in recent Russian history.

The water bottles were a stark symbol of how the children were left without water or food by their captors.

Casualty figures continued to swing wildly, with the official death toll from the carnage standing at 335 people -- half of them children -- although a worker in the region's main morgue said that it had received 394 bodies.

Some 400 people, including 224 children under 17, remained hospitalized, 82 of them in serious condition.

The Japan Times Weekly: Sept. 11, 2004
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