BESLAN, Russia, Sept 7 (AFP) - Eighteen of the estimated 1,000 people held hostage at a school in southern Russia are still unaccounted for, their families unable to find them either in morgues or hospitals three days after the tragedy, authorities in North Ossetia said late Monday.
In seven cases, relatives said that the missing hostages were seen alive after the school was stormed by security forces on Friday to end the three-day standoff, but later disappeared, North Ossetian government spokesman Lev Dzugayev told AFP.
However, psychologists warned that stress could make people misidentify their children, Dzugayev said by way of explanation for such cases often invoked by the media.
He argued the missing could be among 115 bodies still left unidentified, 42 among them in pieces that only a genetic analysis could help identify.
Another hypothesis has it that some children, in shock after their harrowing 53-hour ordeal and an escape from a burning school, could have hidden somewhere, too afraid to come out.
Some hospitalised children could have been registered under a different name, Dzugayev suggested, citing an example of two young patients who refused to communicate due to extreme trauma and whose identity remained unknown.
The bloodshed in Beslan left 335 people dead, half of them children, and hundreds of wounded.