RUSSIA: Hundreds of mourners carrying red roses gathered at Beslan High School Number One yesterday to mark the anniversary of a siege that cost more than 300 lives.
With police and troops deployed around the town amid fears of new rebel attacks, the mourners observed a minute's silence to remember the dead, who included 186 children.
Meanwhile, residents showed their anger at what they regard as a government cover-up into blunders during the siege by publishing a letter pleading with foreign nations to give them asylum.
The letter claims that the government mishandled the siege and begs for foreign nations to save them from a country "where a human life means nothing".
Schools across the country began their academic year yesterday, but in Beslan the first day has been put back to next week.
President Putin, told by a mother's group he would not be welcome, observed a minute's silence while visiting a school in a town 300 miles from Beslan.
The protest letter came as a delegation of Beslan parents headed to Moscow to make their complaints directly to the president, whom they will meet today.
In the letter hundreds of people from the little town in southern Russia beg for asylum.
"We . . . have lost all hope for a just investigation of the reasons and the guilty parties in our tragedy," it says.
"We do not wish to live any more in this country, where a human life means nothing."
The letter follows mounting anger over government mistakes in handling the siege, which happened when 30 Chechen rebels seized the school, hoping to use the hostages to persuade Moscow to release rebel prisoners.
Residents say there is evidence that the army may have inadvertently started the fire that consumed the school, and want a fuller investigation.
"We have waited patiently almost a year for them to tell us the truth," the letter says. "However, time and the actions of authorities have shown us that they will never tell us the truth."
In the town itself, it was a day for mourning rather than protest. Russian Orthodox priests in flowing black robes chanted prayers and some sobbing mourners placed thin wax candles and toys on the remnants of the school's gymnasium walls.
Others placed bottles of water, a reminder of the three days during which sweltering children were refused water by the hostage takers.
As a reflection of the international sympathy the tragedy has attracted, a large red banner decorated with white doves bore the names of children from around the world who have written to offer their condolences.
Beslan police arrested and later released a Russian journalist from US-funded Radio Liberty, saying he was in the town without an accreditation card.
Meanwhile, the war in Chechnya went on, with two policemen and an unknown number of rebels slain in fighting around the village of Novoterskoye. Yesterday marked the start of a seventh year of war in the province.