BESLAN, Russia — The bodies of Beslan's children lay in freshly dug graves when the most troubling questions of the deadly hostage-taking at Middle School No. 1 started to emerge.
On the roof of a five-story apartment building across from the school where 318 hostages died and about 700 others were wounded in September, residents found three large, empty tubes, a little more than 36 inches long, marked with red stripes and numeric codes. In Russia's battle-scarred North Caucasus region, it didn't take long to find someone who could identify them as the casings of a rocket-fired flamethrower projectile.
Had someone fired flamethrowers at a school full of captive children? Why?
Similar confusion surrounded the discovery outside the school of three casings from the enormous, 125-millimeter cannon of a T-72 tank.
Were any hostages alive when the tank pointed its gun at the school and opened fire?
A week from today, Russia will observe the first anniversary of the worst terrorist act in its history. But Beslan residents have made it clear that senior officials in Moscow, including President Vladimir V. Putin, are not welcome at the ceremonies -- not until it is certain that the authorities themselves bear no responsibility for the lives lost in the explosions and storming operation that ended the three-day ordeal in the Russian republic of North Ossetia.
The tragedy began when an estimated three dozen militants, calling for Russian troops to leave the neighboring republic of Chechnya, herded 1,128 students, teachers and parents into a stuffy gymnasium and wired it with makeshift bombs.
But what caused the deadly conflagration that ended the standoff remains unclear, and the doubts have loomed larger as time has passed. According to the official version, bombs accidentally exploded inside the school, touching off a fire that rushed through the gym and killed many of the hostages.
But numerous survivors believe that the furious gun battle between the hostage-takers and armed forces outside the school may have played a crucial role in igniting and spreading the blaze.
A confidential military prosecutor's review of the siege obtained by the Los Angeles Times, along with interviews with former hostages and a government videotape of the carnage, suggests a chaotic operation with little or no communication among military units.
