NO MORE than seven years old, this slender little girl was tossed into the air by an explosion that sent her flying through the gymnasium window at middle school No 1 in Beslan onto the grass outside.

Dressed only in underpants and a smart pair of white sandals she had worn for the first day of the new school year, the girl lay still for a while, then struggled stiffly to her feet.

But instead of running away from the smoking gym, which, after two huge blasts, was strewn with decapitated corpses and disembodied limbs, she paused for breath, leaning with one hand against the wall, then decided to climb back inside.

Too shocked to understand what was happening as a battle raged around her between Russian forces and terrorists who had held 1,200 people hostage for 52 hours at the school in North Ossetia, she somehow found the strength to step onto a ledge and grasp the shattered window frame.

Finally, pushing on her hands, she raised herself up and clambered head-first over the frame to rejoin the dead on the floor of the gym.

Only one other child — a weeping boy — looked up as her face, framed by long dark hair piled in a topknot, appeared at the window. Two dazed women could be seen in the shadows behind but neither went to her aid.

Through binoculars less than 100 yards away, the terrible details of the scene that awaited the girl were all too visible: perhaps 60 bodies scattered with shards of glass lay among the debris.

The girl was not seen again. Fifteen minutes later a third explosion ripped through the building and started a fire that would burn fiercely for six hours. The roof quickly collapsed and it was difficult to see how anyone could have survived.

Yesterday human remains were still being recovered from the gym. The official death toll from Russia’s worst terrorist attack climbed to 323, but at a mortuary in the North Ossetian capital, Vladikavkaz, the photographer who took this sequence of pictures for The Sunday Times counted about 400 sets of remains.

More than 600 people were in hospital, many in critical condition suffering from severe burns, gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Dozens were still missing as rescue workers continued to search smouldering wreckage at the school.

There was mounting criticism of the Russian handling of the siege, which ended in chaos after the explosions sent children, parents and teachers fleeing under fire. Sources in the Federal Security Service (FSB), the former KGB, said no order to shoot back and storm the building had been given to soldiers, but that they had lost their nerve at the sight of the hostages running for their lives.

It was claimed that the Chechen hostage takers had planned the raid weeks in advance. The FSB in North Ossetia said they had hidden most of the explosives used to mine the building during renovation work carried out in the summer holidays.

Investigators suggested that some of the builders working on the site had smuggled in the explosives and hidden them in a basement and under the school’s new linoleum floor.

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