Mourners prepared for the first funerals today of 330 people killed in the bloody battle that ended the siege of a southern Russian school on Friday - but others did not know if loved ones had survived.
Hundreds of wounded were still being treated in hospitals in Beslan and nearby towns, and distraught relatives - caught between hope and despair - scanned hand-written lists of living patients or toured morgues trying to identify the dead.
"My son is missing," Mr Albert Adykhayev told NTV television. "He is too young to say who he is. I just don't know on what lists and under what name he will appear." His son is three.
Hospital doctors tried to help on Saturday by displaying photographs of unidentified patients, children too small or too shocked to give their names.
Many townspeople, still stunned by the ferocity of the battle between security forces and the Chechen militants who stormed the school on Wednesday and took more than 1,000 hostages, have spent two days searching for friends or family.
Hundreds queued yesterday outside the morgue in the nearby city of Vladikavkaz to identify relatives among the rows of dead laid out on stretchers, holding handkerchiefs to their faces to keep out the stench.
Of the 330 known to have died, 155 were children, the others their parents and teachers, all trapped in the school where they had gathered for festivities marking the first day of term.
Mr Soslan Bidoyev, 23, was relieved to find his brother in a Vladikavkaz hospital, but shocked by his account of events at the school on Wednesday.
"He told us that when the hostages were brought in, the gunmen made the adults pry open the gymnasium floor. They took out supplies of weapons from underneath the floor," he said.
"He told me the first explosion was right there."
Such accounts strengthened the view that the gunmen were well prepared and had local help, and fuelled the anger of residents who accused President Putin of making only a token visit to the town and failing in his duty to protect them.
In his address, Mr Putin said Russia had failed to adapt to new defence and security needs and must now put this right.