Pizzas galore!

Initially refugees thought that the jet was Russian. “They thought that it had come to help,” she said, but when they saw that something was dropping, the refugees scattered and there were only a few light wounds.

Five thousand refugees came through her centre, said Ms Gogichaeva and she said many had tales of indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

“I am ready to cry at the whole of the world. I am ready to go to Europe to tell,” said Ms Gogichaeva, slamming Western newspapers for not covering the Georgian assault on South Ossetia.

Elza, a nurse working in Tskhinvali, told The Times that she had treated many civilians with bullet wounds. “They were shooting at them,” she said before hanging up.

A Reuters journalist who visited the town reported that more than 200 wounded in the fighting were being treated in the hospital.

Another Russian journalist described how militia fighter Beslan Sanakoyev took her to a pile of Georgian bodies on the pavement. One of them had been set on fire and in the ashes only legs and hands had remained.

"What? Shall we bury them?" said Mr Sanakoyev. "Nobody will dig a hole for them. They did not feel sorry for us, why should we feel sorry for them."

There were also reports of violence directed at ethnic Georgians. In villages once populated by Georgians on the outskirts of Tskhinvali, South Ossetian fighters reportedly set fire to Georgian houses, and carried out searches in the villages.

The claims and counter-claims come amid a growing humanitarian crisis in the town, where broken glass and fallen masonry litter the streets, and those who have not fled are hiding in basements with no mains electricity or running water and little food.

Doctors at the town’s hospital have been working in the basement since the building was hit by Georgian artillery strikes on the first day of the conflict. A generator provides some light, but conditions are basic and unsanitary with dust covering the floor.

The first view of the shattered town of Tskhinvali came from Russian journalists on Kommersant, a Moscow business newspaper.

"Doctors have only been treating war injuries, mainly shrapnel and bullet wounds," chief doctor Nodar Kokoyev told the paper, adding that they had very little medication left.

"We have sent 160 wounded to Vladikavkaz in the last three days."

Upstairs, three Russian soldiers, killed in a rocket attack on Sunday, were reported to be lying on the floor of the old operating theatre.

There were reports of two women discovered headless in their flats after an artillery attack. It took half a day to identify them and then they were buried in the garden, according to the newspaper.

"Why the garden?" asked the Kommersant reporter.

"You cannot go the cemetery. You will get shot," answered one woman. "You cannot keep the body at home, nobody knows what will be in the next hour. Maybe we won’t exist so we bury them without a coffin."

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that, across Georgia, 100,000 people have been forced to flee their homes by the fighting.

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