Beslan mourns with tolling bell, doves

Residents of the Russian town of Beslan, blaming authorities and still seething with anger, grieved silently on Saturday to mark…

Residents of the Russian town of Beslan, blaming authorities and still seething with anger, grieved silently on Saturday to mark the day a year ago when hundreds of their children were killed in a school siege.

President Vladimir Putin, who met Beslan parents on Friday to hear their accounts, on Saturday ordered prosecutors from Moscow to check official failings and chaos at the end of the siege by pro-Chechen militants that ended in a bloodbath.

Tearful residents held a minute's silence after filing through the town's shattered school on Saturday, adding wreaths to a vast floral memorial to the 331 people who died, mostly in an explosion, fire and shooting on the final day of the siege.

A list of the dead took 22 minutes to be read out and the streets of the town were empty with more than 12,000 people gathered for the final ceremony of three days of mourning.

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Crying children released white balloons -- one for each person that died -- in tribute to those who perished.

Orthodox priests comforted residents, who then moved in their thousands toward the cemetery where hundreds of white doves were released at a memorial.

A broad swathe of red carnations ran down the middle of the school's blackened sports hall, where the more than 1,000 children and parents were held by armed guerrillas demanding an independent Chechnya.

"This marks the place where the terrorists walked so we covered it in flowers so that no one would walk on it," said Ms Svetlana Psgoyeva, who lost her granddaughter in the siege, which came to a chilling end a year ago on Saturday.

"Our children will be looking down on us from heaven and they would be scared to see someone walking on that place," she said.

Photographs of the dead, more than half of them children, smiled down on weeping mothers who pressed their faces against the pictures of their loved ones.