The wrecked building itself now a sea of flowers, pictures and messages from around the world.



Now comes the search for blame and questions over the Kremlin's handling of the siege.



A Parliamentary inquiry is investigating what went wrong.



Channel 4 News has learned that, from the very beginning, the Kremlin knew far more about what was going on down in Beslan than it has so far admitted to.



Aslanbek Aslakhanov was on the phone to the hostage-takers within hours of their seizing the school, he knew what they wanted and he knew the rough number of hostages.



So why were 54 hours allowed to elapse before he arrived in Beslan?



Alexander Torshin, the head of the Beslan Parliamentary Inquiry said: "We are looking into that. It's a question that's also being asked by the victims. And why didn't the government ministers fly down - the Interior Minister and the Director of the Federal Security Service. Why didn't they go down? And yes, why did Aslakhanov arrive only on the third day? There are a lot of questions that we'll be looking to answer."



Aslakhanov's own explanation is confused. Even though he was Vladamir Putin's man, there was apparent reluctance to vest in him the Presidential authority he needed -- perhaps because of Putin's personal reluctance to even engage with those responsible.



Aslakhanov said: "I reported my conversations with the hostage-takers to my boss, who's in charge of the President's office. I told him I thought I should fly down there immediately to start the process of negotiating and initiate contact. I was told that until they announced their demands and conditions, there wasn't any point in my going."



Yet Aslakhanov did already know what the demands and conditions were.



He said: "The terrorists here, like those in the Dubrovka theatre seige, put forward a series of demands that we couldn't possibly agree to which were full troop withdrawal from Chechnya, recognition of Chechen independence. These demands were unfeasible."



Aslakhanov had several telephone conversations with the leader of the gang in Beslan. Much of the content revolved around how many hostages there actually were.



He added: "I had two conversations on September 1. The terrorist who I started talking to in Chechen told me to speak in Russian because he didn't understand. I discovered that they had taken not 350 or 400 people, as was being reported, but as he said, more than 1200 hostages, over 70% of whom were children. I reported this to the media on the first day."



But, strangely, it's not what the media was reporting. Aslanbek Aslakhanov's information did not get through. Outside School Number One, frantic parents were kept in the dark by officials, many of whom did not seem to know either.



According to the testimony of surviving hostages, the mis-reporting of the numbers held captive infuriated the gunmen, who then punished the hostages, by denying them water.



At 6.30 in the evening of the second day, Aslakhanov says he agreed with the hostage-takers that he would fly down from Moscow the next morning and that at 3pm on the 3rd of September, negotiations would start.



As he drove into Beslan that afternoon, there were two big bangs, which we now know were the bombs going off in the gym.



Torshin said: "The explosions on the 3rd weren't in the interests of the terrorists or of the security forces. It turned everything on its head. A negotiating process had already started. Aslakhanov was flying there with concrete proposals. We needed another hour or hour and a half, and this is also a question - why was there an explosion? We're studying that."



The there are just so many questions, but the biggest of all, and the one which most bothers the government's critics, including many in Beslan, is whether the commission itself will ever do more than just deflect blame from the Kremlin.



In the emotionally charged, volatile atmosphere prevailing in North Ossetia, Alexander Torshin says that he's worried his findings may prove inflamatory.