The three-day siege ended in scenes of horror that the press described as the "worst possible scenario", with half-naked, bloodied children fleeing from the school and the mutilated bodies of the dead rushed out on stretchers.

Dozens of unexploded bombs remained in the building, hampering efforts to bring out burned corpses still in the school gymnasium where the hostages were held, an interior ministry official told the Interfax agency.

"All of Russia suffers for you and prays together with the people of the republic," said Putin during his unannounced pre-dawn visit to Beslan, in the Caucasian republic of North Ossetia, where he visited some of the 700 wounded in the storm of the school building by crack troops.

Some 322 people, including 155 children, were killed in the hostage siege in a southern Russian school on the edge of Chechnya, said Russia's Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky.

"We are still identifying the bodies. We have recovered 322 bodies, 155 of them are children," Fridinsky told reporters.

"These are not the final figures, and they will probably grow, but not by too much."

He also said that 27 hostage-takers were killed in the attacks and three were captured in the fighting which continued on the school grounds but also spread to several neighbourhoods around the school.

Officials said that among the hostage-takers killed there were nine people of Arab descent and one black man. Over 10 special forces troops lost their lives in the assault, the crisis unit said.

Putin ordered crackdown in southern Russia after the school siege and warned Chechen sympathisers yesterday they would be seen as "accomplices of terrorism."

"One of the tasks pursued by the terrorists was to stoke ethnic hatred, blow up the whole of our North Caucasus," Putin told local security officials.

"Anyone who will feels sympathetic toward such provocations will be viewed as accomplices of terrorists and terrorism."

The hard words suggested Putin had no intention of backing down from his tough policies of crushing Chechnya's separatist rebellion to keep the mainly Muslim region within Russia, using tactics long criticised by human rights activists.

The storming of the school by Russian forces plunged the small town of Beslan into pandemonium. Troops and armed civilians advanced on the red brick building after explosions inside. Pupils, parents and teachers, many drenched in blood, were carried out on stretchers or in the arms of local men.

Questions remained about the circumstances of the assault, and Putin in apparent contradiction insisted that special forces had not planned the action to free the hostages, held without food or water by armed militants demanding independence for Chechnya.

"We examined all possible courses of action at Beslan, but use of force was not planned," the ITAR-TASS agency quoted Putin as saying during a meeting here with local and national officials.

(AFP, REUTERS)