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Even in an era dominated by terrorism, the siege of School No 1 in Beslan, in the northern Caucasus, stands out as unusually horrific and pointless. The assault began on September 1, 2004: just as the children were celebrating the start of a new school year, a group of heavily armed Chechens stormed the building, capturing some 1,200 hostages in a few minutes. For the next 72 hours, the terrorists kept their prisoners, mostly women and children, in the airless school gymnasium. They refused them food and water, forbade them use of the lavatories, shot them at random. When babies cried for water, they fired at the ceiling and called for silence. On the third day came the terrible denouement: a series of explosions, the collapse of the gymnasium roof, children running from the school in a hail of bullets, hundreds of casualties. All but one of the terrorists died, too.

Timothy Phillips, a translator of Russian and a specialist on the Caucasus region, had access to many of the Beslan survivors and has used their accounts to put together the first written narrative of the tragedy. He also broadens the story to include an investigation of the town and its culture. The huge numbers of people at that first-day-of-school ceremony were, he points out, evidence of the continued faith, inherited from Soviet times, in the importance of education. The near absence of men in the audience, on the other hand, shows how few Caucasian men take an interest in their children. The shocking absence of emergency services (wounded children were taken to hospitals in private cars, since no ambulances were available) is evidence of Russia’s incredibly primitive provincial state infrastructure.

But the book still feels incomplete, which is perhaps not the fault of the author. For the truth is that many of the basic facts about Beslan remain mysterious. To date, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has said little about it, though he must have had a role in the negotiations. No satisfactory public inquiry has been completed. As time has passed, writes Phillips, “more and more survivors have given up trying to understand the truth of what happened to them”. Phillips himself cannot establish an exact chronology of what happened on the final day: “I had to accept that no single, reliable account existed.” Some of the survivors are convinced that the explosion that destroyed the gymnasium came from outside, triggered by the Russian authorities. Some think the terrorists set it off themselves – maybe using weapons hidden earlier inside the walls of the school.

And, of course, the motives of the terrorists remain utterly opaque. Did they really believe that by holding 1,200 women and children hostage, they would secure the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya? Did they really think that a school siege in Russia could end in anything except a blood bath?

Nobody’s motives seem logical. No reliable information exists to help clarify them. As a result, conspiracy theories flourish. Some claim that the school principal, or the negotiators who came in from outside, were in league with the terrorists. Ill will persists, too: Phillips writes that despite the emotions unleashed in the town by the attack, “people’s outlook on life has hardened”. There is no moral to the story, no silver lining. The pointless violence of that siege continues to cause pain, and no doubt will do so for decades to come.

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