BESLAN, Russia (AP) – A numb Russia observed a national day of mourning yesterday for the hundreds of victims of the terrorist school seizure, while in this grief-stricken southern region neighbouring Chechnya families continued searching for the missing.

A prosecutor said the hostage-takers belonged to a cell formed by radical Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, the Interfax news agency reported. A man authorities say is a detained hostage-taker also said on state-run television that he was told Basayev and separatist former Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov were behind the attack.

Investigators believed the assailants were “the core of Basayev’s band” and had taken part in a June attack – also blamed on Basayev – targeting police and security officials in neighbouring Ingushetia, Mikhail Lapotnikov, a senior investigator in the North Caucasus prosecutors’ office said on Channel One television. Eighty-eight people were killed in the June attack.

The detainee, identified in other media reports as Nur-Pashi Kulayev, said on Rossiya television that he and other members of the group were told the operation’s goal was “to unleash a war on the whole of the Caucasus” – echoing the official reason for the attack put forward by President Vladimir Putin and other officials.

There was no way to confirm the accuracy of comments made by the detainee, who had been featured prominently on state-run channels since Sunday. Channel One – whose anchor called the man a “monster” – showed him looking frightened on Sunday as he was manhandled by masked law enforcement officers and swearing to Allah that he didn’t shoot women and children.

Mikhail Lapotnikov, a senior investigator in the North Caucasus prosecutors’ office, said the investigation had established that the same group attacked police and security officials in neighboring Ingushetia in June, Interfax said.

In Beslan, townspeople crowded around the coffins of children, parents, grandparents and teachers ahead of the 120 burials scheduled in the town cemetery and adjoining fields. Trains passing the cemetery stopped and blew their horns to show of respect for the dead.

Among the first laid to rest were Zinaida Kudziyeva, 42, and her 10-year-old daughter Madina Tomayeva. Relatives said the two had stood up in an attempt to flee when the first explosions went off and found themselves in the line of fire between the militants and Russian forces.

“They couldn’t run away. They didn’t have time,” said Irakly Khosulev, a relative from the nearby city of Vladikavkaz. “Someone should answer for this.”

Police threw up heavy security cordons on the road leading to the cemetery, checking cars and identification papers in ahead of a visit by a high-level government delegation including Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and North Ossetian President Alexander Dzasokhov. The dignitaries stood on a stage draped in red and black, interrupting the solemn burials all around them as the addressed a small crowd through loudspeakers.

One woman approached the stage and shouted angrily at them to turn off the loudspeakers. A group of men hustled her – and reporters attempting to speak with her – away from the stage.

Criticism of the government’s response to the tragedy mounted yesterday, with even Russian state television chiding officials for understating the magnitude of the crisis, being too slow to admit that terrorists had executed recent attacks and for their apparent paralysis.

The official death toll yesterday stood at 335, plus the 30 attackers; the regional health ministry said 326 of the dead had been hostages, and the Emergency Situations Ministry said 156 of the dead were children.

Of the more than 700 people who needed medical help after the crisis, 411 remained hospitalised yesterday – 214 of them children, the North Ossetian health ministry said. Of the most badly injured, 23 were in Moscow and 11 in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.

The school seizure came a day after a suicide bombing in Moscow killed 10 people and just over a week after two Russian passenger planes crashed following explosions, killing all 90 people aboard – two attacks authorities suspect were linked to Russia’s ongoing war in Chechnya.