by Henry Meyer
MOSCOW, Sept 7 (AFP) - An accidental explosion may have triggered the violent Russian assault in Beslan but the chaos that surrounded it showed poor management of Russia's worst-ever hostage crisis, experts said Tuesday.
"It was a total disaster," said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst.
"A 12-hour gunfight, only 10 percent of the hostages escaped, the rest were either killed or wounded and heavy losses among special forces ... Bad organization is recurrent in our security forces," he said.
Most commentators accepted that the authorities did not plan at that moment to storm the school where some 30 heavily armed militants demanding independence for breakaway Chechnya were holding around 1,200 people.
But experts and Russian newspapers have asked how events could have spun so badly out of control once the shooting began and armed locals, some with family members held hostage inside, surged into the gunfight.
"It was a complete mess," said Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Centre think-tank.
"The assault was not planned, it started spontaneously. It all shows the security services' inability to cope with such crisis situations."
The fact that a proper security cordon was not in place around the school was a sign of "how disorganised everything was," he added.
With the world still in shock at the deaths of nearly 350 children and adults, President Vladimir Putin promised to investigate the chain of events that ended the three-day hostage siege in a total bloodbath.
"I want to establish the chronicle of events and find out who is responsible and might be punished," he told a group of foreign journalists and Russia experts late Monday, a correspondent from Britain's The Guardian reported.
Some newspapers have attributed the chaos partly to the fact that hour-by-hour management of the crisis seemed to have been left mainly with local officials rather than top federal law enforcement authorities.
The Moscow News weekly said that the crisis "seemed for Moscow to be merely a local incident."
It said that North Ossetian parliament speaker Taimuraz Mamsurov, whose two children were reportedly among the hostages, played a key role in the local crisis cell.
The gun battle erupted shortly after 1 p.m local time Friday as two emergency workers came into the besieged school to collect the bodies of hostages killed at the start of the hostage crisis.
According to hostages' accounts, a bomb taped to a basket-ball hoop inside the school accidentally fell, setting off an explosion.
Amid scenes of chaos, dozens of half-naked children escaped, and firing started between the militants holed up inside and the Russian forces who had encircled them.
Ruslan Aushev, the former president of neighbouring Ingushetia and the only negotiator to enter the school during the siege, accused armed civilians who had been allowed to break through the security cordon of triggering the assault.
"When an explosion went off and the children started to flee, we phoned the hostage-takers and asked them to stop firing. They replied: 'We have stopped firing, it's you who are firing," he told the Novaya Gazeta's Monday edition.
"We gave the order to stop firing but there was a third force, these popular militias who decided to liberate the hostages on their own," said Aushev.
According to him, it was only then that the hostage-takers activated other explosions and the decision was made by Russian forces to storm the building.
The Russian press reported that the crack Alpha anti-terrorist unit had been unprepared to launch the attack and quoted the president of the Alpha veterans' association as saying that most agreed an assault was too risky at that point.
Indeed elite Alpha units were not in possession of a map of the school grounds when the assault began, the former special forces officer Igor Senin told the Vremya Novostei newspaper's Tuesday edition.