Russia’s NTV television showed graphic footage shot by the militants who took more than a thousand hostages in a school in Beslan in the south of the country last week.
The pictures showed militants including a masked and heavily armed man and a woman in Arab-style black headdress, as well as hundreds of hostages sitting in the gymnasium that later became a battleground. At least 335 people, about half of them children, died when Russian troops stormed the school.
Blood was smeared on the floor. Bombs hung from a basketball hoop and from a wire suspended across the room. Another lay on the floor in a plastic container.
One militant squatted, apparently working on a bomb with tape and wire clippers. The few spaces left by the hostages, including women fanning themselves in the heat and children with their hands on their heads, were strewn with wires and what appeared to be bomb-making equipment.
One militant stood with his foot on a book which the commentary said contained a trip-switch to activate a bomb. Elsewhere a rocket-propelled grenade lay unattended.
The video lasted around a minute and ended with the sound of one of the hostage-takers murmuring into his mobile phone. He was not speaking Russian.
