By now the horrendous details are well known. On 1st September, 40 heavily armed fighters in camouflage fatigues leapt from three military vehicles in front of School Nr. 1 in Beslan, a small city in North Ossetia, the only Christian-Orthodox republic among Russia's largely Muslim Caucasian territories. The attackers herded into the school's gym some 1,200 civilians - teachers, children and their relatives attending the traditional celebration of the first day of the new school year in Russia - and shot dead several guards and civilians who opposed the hostage-taking operation.

Once inside, twenty hostages - all civilians, all unarmed, all adult men - were killed and thrown out of the windows. What followed was nothing short of a nightmare.

In the beginning, precious hours had been wasted in total confusion regarding the identity of the hostage takers and what they actually wanted. The first comprehensive demand was the release of terrorists captured by Russian troops in the aftermath of another attack in neighbouring Ingushetia in June. Later on, the scope of demands widened to the immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya.

According to subsequent reports by hostages, the terrorists wired the gym, attaching explosive charges filled with pieces of metal on the two basketball hoops and then lining the walls with

them. They frequently fired into the air to keep the hostages silent, and by the second day, having been denied any food or water the 1,200 people were so crowded they were literally sitting on top of each other. One terrorist was reportedly shot dead by the group's commander for allegedly protesting against holding children hostages. The two shakhids - female terrorists who wore explosive belts around their waists - were also blown up by the boss during the first hours of the operation, killing dozens of hostages.

During the second day of the attack a ray of hope glimmered as the terrorists released 26 hostages, mothers and infants, after brief talks with Ingushetia's respected former president Ruslan Aushev. However, many other very young children remained inside.

The terrorists threatened to execute 50 hostages for each of their own killed by the Russian commandoes that surrounded the building, should they dare try storming the gym. Outside, the Russian authorities, President Putin included, stated that their first and foremost goal was to avoid any further loss of innocent lives.

As hours passed, the condition of the hostages worsened dramatically. The unbearable heat forced many to undress to their underwear as their thirst forced them to drink their own urine.

For reasons still unknown, the situation deteriorated on Friday, 3rd September. During the morning the terrorists began to threaten the hostages with a bloodbath, while at least some of them changed out of their camouflage fatigues into civilian clothing, apparently preparing for the endgame. At 1.00 pm they allowed a vehicle to approach the building in order to collect the corpses that had been rotting in the schoolyard for three days.

At that moment, an explosion was heard; seconds later another, stronger one followed which blasted a hole in one of the gym's walls. Then, hell broke loose. Screaming children began to jump through the windows, or through the holes in the wall. Many of them were shot in the back by the terrorists, while the Russian soldiers outside responded with gunfire, in a desperate attempt to stop the terrorists shooting at escaping children.

According to some accounts, there was a very brief ceasefire on both sides. But it was over within minutes as hundreds of desperate, armed local civilians broke through police ranks and chaotically stormed the building. In the havoc that followed, terrorists began to kill the hostages inside indiscriminately, and detonate the charges along the walls. A series of explosions caused the gym's roof to partially collapse, killing dozens more. Several terrorists regrouped in the school's canteen, others in the basement. The subsequent fighting lasted for almost ten hours and cost the lives of at least another 50 hostages.

When the havoc ended, the scene was horrific beyond imagination, with hundreds of bodies lying strewn throughout the place, most of them women and children who had been shot in the back or in the head. Blood and dismembered limbs were everywhere, including some of toddlers barely out of the cradle. All in all, the death toll was 335, half of which children. Eleven Russian troops also died, as did all but one of the terrorists.

Who and why?

By the organised, deliberated and cold-blooded fashion in which terrorists targeted the most vulnerable and innocent victims, this tragedy was probably the worst atrocity humankind has seen since the German concentration camps of world war two. Tens of thousands of civilians, including thousands of children, have died on the ravaged battlefields, cities and villages of Chechnya and elsewhere, but the calculated cruelty of the Beslan crime, indeed a carefully planned mass murder operation, remains unparalleled. It turned out that the attack was planned long ago, and during the summer, while the gym was closed and undergoing repairs, weapons and explosives had been hidden under the floor.

The international reaction to the tragedy was mixed, to say the least. Whereas the comments of thousands of people around the world echoed those of their governments in blaming the terrorists and mourning the innocent victims, the reaction of the Western media was bewildering at best. Maybe 90 per cent of the stories I have read since the massacre ñ and even during the school siege ñ dedicated precious few words to the victims themselves and to condemning the assassins, while choosing instead to put the blame on Putin's failed policies in Chechnya and on the mishandling of the crisis by the Russian special forces.

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Not since the second world war has the 'civilised' world seen as ferocious and coldblooded a mass killing as what was witnessed in Beslan. But for many, Beslan seems to be just another opportunity to slap Putin in the face - which is exactly what the terrorists wanted in the first place. It is difficult to imagine a more cynical reaction. Perhaps the best expression of this bias resides in the fact that most Western media went to great pains to avoid calling a spade a spade, and the Beslan murderers for what they were - terrorists. A brief selection of the euphemisms used include 'attackers' and 'radicals', 'captors' and 'freedom fighters', 'commandos', 'guerrillas', 'gunmen', 'insurgents', 'militants', 'rebels' and 'separatists'. Ironically, after US President Bush condemned the attack in very resolute terms, the tone changed quite substantially and the word 'terrorists' began to be used. A comparison of the coverage of the Beslan tragedy by Western media and of the 9/11 tragedy by Russia 's media indicates that the vast majority of Western writers lack the sympathy and understanding of their Russian counterparts.

Many theories seeking to explain - or indeed justify - this abhorrent mass murder were published in the ensuing month, including several that reached unbelievable heights of conjecture, such as those that claimed that the FSB (the Russian special services, successor to the KGB), or even Putin himself engineered the tragedy. As if Putin needed precisely such a devastating blow to his authority and to the public trust he has enjoyed uninterruptedly for the past five years from a vast majority of his countrymen.

One common feature of these theories is that they all link the attack to Chechnya 's war for independence - an aspect the Russian authorities, and Putin particularly, strongly denied.

It should be noted that the Beslan attack was the most recent in a series that began immediately after Aslan Maskhadov - Chechnya's fugitive president, in hiding since the breakout of the second Chechen war in 1999 - declared that a decision was made on 14th June this year to push the war to a new level, when hostilities would be taken to Russian territory, and where “all targets will be considered legitimate.”

The dark warning was accompanied by a promise by Akhmed Zakayev, Maskhadov's culture minister and one of his envoys in the West, that any individual elected president in Chechnya would also automatically become a legitimate target. This was all the more ominous as it came only one month after Akhmed Kadyrov, the Chechen president elected last year with broad Russian support, had been assassinated in the Chechen capital, Grozny.

“Like last time, the authorities will be signing the death warrant of the man they pick. Neither elections, nor Russia 's current politics in Chechnya will bring the desired results,” Zakayev said. Any normal individual would expect that Zakayev - a man who claims that his organisation will both ignore the results of elections (not contest them, but simply ignore) and kill the winner, whoever that might be - would at least be asked a few questions. Instead, Zakayev was granted political asylum by, and enjoys de facto political immunity in the UK .

One week after these revealing statements, on 21st June, a large number of Chechen and Ingush fighters raided Nazran, the capital city of Chechnya 's western neighbour, Ingushetia. It ended with almost 100 deaths. The fighters killed mostly policemen and interior ministry staff, including the minister. According to AFP reports, they also opened fire on passing civilian vehicles and ambulances. Among the victims was Ingushetia's health minister. A UN employee was also killed, as were dozens of Ingush civilians, children and a pregnant Ingush woman was executed in cold blood.

One month later, several dozen insurgents launched a night raid in Grozny , setting up their own checkpoints, pulling police and soldiers out of their cars and executing them in the street. The death toll was 50.

And then the darkest week arrived. On 24 August, two Russian passenger airliners were blown up almost simultaneously in flight by Chechen 'black widows,' or shakhids, in a copycat version of Al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack. Eighty nine died. On 30th August another ten innocent bystanders died when a suicide bomber blew herself up at Rizhskaya underground station in Moscow. These two attacks were carried out by a previously unknown group, the Islambouli Brigades. Khaled Islambouli was the Egyptian army officer who assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981. He was a member of the Jihad group which was partially absorbed by Al-Qaeda in the 1990s under Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's second in command. Islambouli's brother Mohammed is also a prominent Al-Qaeda figure.

And then came Beslan.

It is difficult to escape the impression that one of the goals of this deadly series was to intimidate Russian and Chechen citizens, who on 29 August replaced Kadyrov with another Moscow-backed man, Chechnya 's former interior minister Alu Alkhanov.

The theories voiced by the Western media have another common feature - they all recommend that the Kremlin conduct talks with the 'moderate' government headed by Maskhadov. To begin with, it is beyond comprehension what kind of independence would be one built upon the maimed corpses of Beslan's children.

Survivors among the hostages said terrorists confirmed that some of their most modern weapons had been stolen from Nazran in neighbouring Ingushetia, during the June attacks on government buildings and police stations there. That attack had been ordered and coordinated by the notorious Chechen commander Shamil Basayev, who even had the temerity to thank the Russians for maintaining the weapons in such good order for him to come and pick them up. The attack was also assumed by Maskhadov, who used it as a landmark example of his new strategy of ''exporting the war to Russian territory.'' If the very same weapons were used less than three months later in Beslan to shoot Ossetian children in the back, wouldn't any even remotely intelligent person see this as factual evidence that Maskhadov and Basayev were both one way or another involved in the massacre, despite the former's denial?

In a press conference following the Beslan massacre, Zakayev said that ''President Maskhadov has declared that there can be no justification for terrorism, and he has called on the Chechen people to mourn those who died in this tragedy.'' Quite remarkably, President Maskhadov appeared to have said nothing to his Chechen people regarding the condemnation of the attackers and those behind them, let alone about the apprehension of those responsible for a crime worthy of the darkest periods of the Middle Ages. According to Zakayev, Maskhadov has ordered an official enquiry of his own into who the perpetrators really were; however, Zakayev also appeared to know the answer beforehand - ''I believe that those responsible for the hostage taking in the school belonged to a local radical group, not linked to any political forces in the North Caucasus .''

And neither has Maskhadov ever clearly dissociated himself and his government from Basayev and his followers. And how could have he done so? After all, back in 1997, Basayev was the first prime minister under Maskhadov's presidency, and since 1999 the two men have appeared side by side, with Basayev swearing allegiance to his president.

Basayev has since admitted he and his followers were responsible not only for the Beslan attack but also for August's bus and metro station bombings and the downing of the two airliners. Or, to be more specific, he said he was behind the attack, had trained terrorists and sent them in, and it is Putin that must accept full responsibility. It had not been difficult to point the finger at him; as far back as June 1995, Basayev had no moral problem in leading his henchmen in seizing a hospital in Budennovsk, near Chechnya, holding 1,500 patients, family members and doctors hostages. More than 100 hostages were killed, whereas another 100 were used as human shields when the Russians gave up and let Basayev retreat unharmed back into Chechnya. That early tragedy emphasises to this day a simple truth, which is accepted worldwide, yet denied to Russia - allowing terrorists to escape and making concessions to them is an open invitation for them carry out ever more horrific attacks.

''Negotiating with such people is unacceptable,'' an angered Putin lashed out at foreign journalists and academics during a recent speech. ''Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?'' Putin was quoted in Britain 's Guardian as saying. ''Would you let people who shoot children in the back gain any sort of power?'' he further retorted.

Meanwhile, Russia's leadership is told - often in a patronising, just short of offensive, tone - that it should negotiate with the moderate Chechen rebels (i.e. Maskhadov), because that's the real issue behind all the attacks, the heinous mass murder in Beslan included. This suggestion alone is self-contradictory and absurd on several fronts. Had they not been killed, even the schoolchildren of Beslan would have noticed striking incongruity.

Firstly, if Maskhadov's claims of having never been involved in civilian killings are true - which is a question in itself - then it is difficult to see how engaging him would stop the bloodshed.

Secondly, if he and his followers are honest, then what can be said at the very best is that they control just a part of the Chechen insurgency, and not the most dangerous one. Indeed, many Chechen fighters when interviewed by Western media have indicated that Maskhadov's power base has eroded to the point where ''he only gives orders to his bodyguards.î'' The effect that submitting to this faction's demands would have on stopping further fighting would be minimal, less than what Moscow obtained by engaging Kadyrov, who at least commands an impressive, 5,000-strong militia of his own.

Thirdly, Maskhadov's denial of involvement in the Beslan attack plays directly into the hands of the Kremlin, which from the very beginning made the very same claim - namely that this was not about Chechnya's independence - which is difficult to accept by the vast majority of Western analysts and policy makers, who apparently know better.

Fourthly, if indeed the Beslan atrocity was about Chechnya and Chechnya only, and if Maskhadov is not able at this point to persuade Chechen hardliners to stop the horrors, what chances would he have to do so when engaged by the Kremlin, under circumstances where the rebels - Maskhadov's camp included - have said that they consider collaborators as much a target as Russian soldiers?

Russia has twice pulled out of Chechnya, another truth conveniently overlooked, and each time things turned out to be worse than before. If Russia pulls out of Chechnya now, as some analysts have suggested they should, it will have to pull out of Dagestan tomorrow, pull out of Ingushetia the day after tomorrow and so on. That then seems to be the overall goal - to drive Russia out of the Caucasus, where a fundamentalist Islamic state would then be established.

The most likely result of Russia's total retreat would be an imposing militant Islamic superstate which would comprise all of Russi 's Muslim republics, and very likely a number of the unstable republics of Central Asia as well. Imagine a state twice the size of Iran, with triple or quadruple times its natural resources, run by battle-hardened veterans, and controlling just about all of Central Asia? Imagine rulers as aggressive and militant as the Taliban, and enjoying full access to resources hundreds of times that of Afghanistan . Or perhaps an unholy alliance with other Muslim states on the periphery, such as many in the oil-rich Arab Middle East, ultimately controlling half of the world's oil. All this could be less than one decade down the line if Russia was to waver and begin to withdraw from the Caucasus. Should Russia give in to terrorism, we can only guess what the next targets would be.

Part two of Catalin Dimofte's analysis will appear in Vivid's November issue.