AFTER 11 operations and almost a year in hospital, Larissa Kudziyeva’s face is still severely disfigured, her injured arm too weak to work.

The 41-year-old accountant wears dark glasses and drapes her hair over one cheek to mask the scars left by the grenade blast. Her blouse just covers the wound that nearly severed her right arm.

Yet she cannot believe her luck as she prepares to take her son, Zaurbek, back to school a year after armed men took them and 1,200 others hostage in Middle School No 1 in the North Ossetian town of Beslan.

Perhaps it was because of her striking looks that the hostage-takers singled her out as she tried to protect Zaurbek, then 7, and Medina, her 20-year-old daughter. Perhaps it was because she was wearing black to mourn the death of her husband a few months before.

She cannot explain exactly why one of the hostage-takers, calling himself Abdullah, took her aside on September 2, the second day of the siege, and made his spine-chilling offer. He said that Zaurbek, Medina and any other relatives could walk free. All she had to do was to strap on a belt of explosives and become a shakhidka, or suicide bomber, in support of their demands that Russia withdraw from neighbouring Chechnya.

Dumbfounded, Mrs Kudziyeva asked if she could have time to think. “Go and sit. You all have time,” she remembers Abdullah saying.

Back in the sports hall with most of the other hostages, she told them about Abdullah’s offer. “They said that maybe I should do it and then the terrorists will let us go,” she recalled.

Mrs Kudziyeva never had time to give her answer. The siege ended the next day when Russian special forces stormed the school in a barrage of gunfire and explosions that killed 331 people, more than half of them children.

Unconscious for five days, she spent most of the next 11 months in hospital.

A year on, however, as official investigators struggle to explain what happened, she has returned home to provide a unique insight into the personalities and aims of the hostage-takers. “I just want people to know what happened in the school, because people ought to know the truth,” she said.

Mrs Kudziyeva was one of the only hostages to establish a working relationship with her captors — a relationship forged, she thinks, when she shouted for help while tending a wounded male hostage.

Abdullah told her to shut up and put his AK47 to her forehead, but she grabbed the barrel and screamed: “Stop play-acting in front of these scared women and children! Your Chechen women give birth in our hospitals and your children stay in our sanitoria.”

Abdullah replied: “Those are not our women and children. They are the spawn of Kadyrov,” referring to the Chechen President assassinated last year. But he backed off nonetheless. Emboldened, Mrs Kudziyeva approached two other hostage-takers, Ali and Ibrahim, to ask if she could take children to get water and go to the lavatory.

Ali, who also called himself “the Press Secretary”, said that she reminded him of his wife, who was killed in an air raid on a Chechen village. He said that his real name was Baisangur. When she asked how long they would be held, he said: “Until the last federal official leaves Chechnya, you will have everything you need.”

Mrs Kudziyeva says that Ali disappeared after the second day, but she later found rucksacks stuffed with food and even toiletries. “They wanted to stay longer than three days,” she said.

At one point a young boy whom she took to the toilet asked Abdullah for help undoing his trousers. “See, he thinks you are a person, not a bandit,” she said. “I’m not a bandit, I’m a terrorist,” he replied.

He told her that Ossetian women were beautiful and that the Chechens would come and take them away in a truck. “I told him they should use an airplane for such beauties,” she recalled. “I wanted to make him talk.” The next day he took her aside and asked if she was Ingush — a mostly Muslim ethnic group whose women often wear black. She said that she was not. He then proposed that she became a suicide bomber.

In hindsight, Mrs Kudziyeva says, she knows that she could not trust her captors. Yet her relationship with them may have helped to save her and several children. On the siege’s third day, she persuaded Ibrahim to let her move a dozen children into an exercise room next to the sports hall, which was cooler and had a small bathroom attached.

After the first explosion of the attempted rescue started a fire in the sports hall, Ibrahim led her with Medina, Zaurbek and several other children into the school’s canteen.

It was then that she saw two special forces soldiers coming through the window. Ibrahim was close to her, but fired only at the soldiers. He then threw two hand grenades, one of which landed a metre from her.

She threw herself on Zaurbek and Medina, absorbing the force of the blast in her right arm and cheek. When she came round on September 8, a doctor told her that she should consider it her new birthday.

“Everything is a miracle — that I can see and that I managed to shield my children,” she said. “I was halfway in the grave and I pulled myself out.”

THE BESLAN SCHOOL SEIGE

At least 350 hostages killed and hundreds taken to hospital

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