A line of police with clubs blocked them."We've had enough words. The wood floor was stained with blood.Football-sized bundles of explosives were hanging from a basketball hoop. One attacker stood among the hostages with a boot on what NTV said was a book rigged with a detonator.In the regional capital Vladikavkaz, more than 1,000 people gathered Wednesday for a rally to demand that North Ossetian officials resign over the handling of the siege. That sparked panic as hostages tried to flee and the attackers opened fire.On Tuesday night, Russians got a chilling glimpse of conditions inside the school when NTV television broadcast images that the station said were recorded by the assailants, presumably for an accounting to their leaders.Hundreds of hostages were shown seated in the school's cramped gym Many had their hands behind their heads. Detainee Nur-Pashi Kulayev said the group's leader, who went by the name Colonel, shot one of the militants and said he would do the same to any other militants or hostages who did not show "unconditional obedience."Later that day, he detonated the explosives worn by two female attackers, killing them, in order to enforce the lesson, Ustinov said.One of the militants was stationed with his foot on a button that would set off the explosives, Ustinov said; if he lifted his foot, the bombs strung up around the school gymnasium would detonate, he said.On Friday, the militants decided to change the arrangement of the explosives, and they appear to have set off one bomb by mistake, Ustinov said. Yuri Baluyevsky, chief of the Russian General Staff, told reporters.Russian leaders have claimed such a right before - tacitly threatening neighboring Georgia that Moscow would pursue Chechen rebels allegedly sheltering on its territory - and two Russian agents were convicted earlier this year for the February car bombing in Qatar that killed a Chechen rebel leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev.

It is hard to know whether the images from inside the school at Beslan are worse in the imagination or in reality. Until now those outside have had to live with the horrors which the mind could conjure. But now we are forced to confront the reality ­ in all its banality and bravado. This is as near as most of us are likely to come to staring into the face of evil. The pictures released last night of the scene inside the school gym where 335 people died and hundreds more were seriously injured are a curious mixture of the ordinary and the outrageous. The room has the bald functional threadbare quality which is the hallmark of post-Communist Russia we have come to expect They cannot afford to have wallbars the length of the room.

The basketball hoops at either end of the room look battered and old.So much for the ordinary. The outrage floods through you when you see the occupants of the place. Row after row of children, parents and grandmas, sitting, their knees drawn up as they huddle. It is as if they are trying to make themselves small to escape the attention of their brutal captors As well they might From the battered basketball hoops hang homemade bombs There is another in the centre of the room. It appears to dangle from a coathanger from the line suspended from one hoop to the other The bombs are crude and amateurish.