At least 322 people, including 155 children, were
killed in the three-day hostage crisis in a southern Russian school, Russia's
Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said on Saturday.
"We are still identifying the bodies. We have
recovered 322 bodies, and 155 of them are children," Fridinsky was quoted by
theItar-Tass news agency as saying.
The prosecutor said the death toll will probably grow
as the clean-up operation is continuing at the site, but it will not rise
considerably.
Emergency workers pulled the bodies out of the school
on Saturday, after Russian special forces rescued more than 400 children and
adults hostages in a special operation that had suppressed the hostage-taking
standoff by Friday night.
Valery Andreyev, regional chief of the Federal
Security Service(FSB), said Friday that over 30 armed militants took part in the
hostage-taking crisis and Russian troops captured three of them alive on Friday,
according to the Interfax news agency.
He said people of Russian origin and foreign
nationals were among the killed hostage-takers. Earlier official information
showed that ten Arab militants were killed in Friday's raid.
Andreyev said a large amount of explosives and mines
planted by hostage-takers in the school have been found, which "may suggest that
the terrorists had prepared for the terrorist attack in advance," Interfax
reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprise
visit early Saturday to the southern Russian town of Beslan where commandos
stormed the school to end the hostage crisis, accusing the attackers of trying
to spark an ethnic conflict that would engulf Russia's troubled Caucasus
Mountains region.