Soldier Recalls the Slaying of a Young Human Shield

"On the second floor, there was one fighter who was covering himself with a child," Mikhail, who gave only his first name, said Saturday. "The child had to be killed first, and then they killed the terrorist. It was the kind of situation where the guys who had to seize the building weren't thinking about anything else. They saw a fighter, and destroyed this fighter.

"So of course, friendly casualties were inevitable."

A day after a battle that would leave 340 hostages dead, participants and witnesses described a scene of bedlam and horror.

The conflagration erupted unexpectedly, so unexpectedly that Russian officials believe now it may well have been an accident. After lacing the building with explosives, investigators believe, hostage-takers who had terrorized 1,000 adults and children for three days may have accidentally pulled the line on one of their own booby traps.

The ensuing explosions prompted several hostages to make a break, and when the guerrillas shot at their captives, Russian commandos outside opened fire. Two hours of intense gunfire and near-pandemonium ensued, as neighborhood men grabbed their own guns to join the fight and bullets began flying in nearly every direction -- even as the hostages, most of them children, were running for safety.

"We drove to the school, and started directing [escaping] children who were running toward us in all possible directions," Mikhail said. "There's only one word that can characterize what was happening: chaos. I don't think there was a strategy or anything. No one had expected anything like this to happen."

An Emergency Situations Ministry employee, sent in to help evacuate hostages and the injured, said the presence of civilians with guns made the situation dangerous for everyone.

When the firing began, four Emergency Situations employees had just approached the school under an agreement to remove long-dead bodies from outside. "Two of our guys were killed instantly, and two others lay wounded for four hours," said the employee, who wouldn't give his name.

"There was this huge crowd of people, most of them with guns, about 500 people, I'd say," the employee said. "They weren't doing anything specifically. They were just running around chaotically."