Beslan, Russia ? Mothers wailed over the coffins of their children Sunday, and dozens of townsmen dug graves in a football field-sized piece of scrubland next to the cemetery. Funeral processions snaked through the streets of this grief-stricken town as Russians began to bury victims of the terror attack on a school that left more than 350 people dead.

Also Sunday, the Russian government admitted that it lied to its people about the scale of the hostage crisis.

Frantic relatives were still searching for 180 people still unaccounted for — many of them children — two days after the bloody climax of the hostage crisis that left few families untouched in this tight-knit, mostly industrial town of 30,000.

Weeping mourners placed flowers and wreaths at the graves, including one where two sisters — Alina, 12, and Irina Tetova, 13 — were laid to rest together. Relatives walked toward the cemetery bearing portraits of the dark-haired girls and simple wooden planks — temporary grave markers — bearing their names and the dates framing their short lives.

Both listed the date of death as Sept. 3, 2004, the day that the hostage seizure — the third deadly terrorist attack to strike Russia in just over a week — ended in a bloody wave of explosions and gunfire as commandos stormed the school and hostages fled after powerful blasts shook the building.

Wails of mourning women echoed from courtyards where families made ritual meals, while surveyors used wooden planks and string to mark new graves being dug in a field near the town’s cemetery.

“When a person goes to the cemetery for a burial, it’s sad, but nothing like this — when you dig graves for your children,” volunteer gravedigger Anzor Kudziyev, 25, said.

“The grief is for all of our people.”

Conflicting numbers

Relatives of Alan Gaitov, 12, killed in the Russian school hostage crisis, cry during his funeral in Beslan. Dozens of funerals were conducted Sunday.

Officials in the southern North Ossetia region scrambled to identify and confirm the number of people killed amid conflicting reports, apparently confused in part because of the large number of body fragments collected at the school.

Tolls ranged from 324 confirmed dead to more than 350.

The regional health ministry said 180 people were missing after the three-day hostage crisis, which began when armed attackers raided School No. 1 on Sept. 1, the first day of classes, seizing students, teachers and parents attending opening-day ceremonies.

ITAR-Tass later cited a Beslan city official as saying that a list of children unaccounted for included 176 names. Russian media speculated that some of the missing could be among the wounded brought to hospitals in North Ossetia, unconscious or too deep in shock — or too young — to identify themselves.

Questions also remained about the number and identity of the hostage-takers — heavily armed and explosive-laden men and women reportedly demanding independence for the nearby republic of Chechnya.

Government admission

Beslan residents dig graves for those killed during the school assault. Although there are conflicting accounts, at least 350 people are believed to have been killed.

The Russian government admitted that it lied to its people about the scale of the hostage crisis, making an extraordinary admission through state television after days of withering criticism from citizens.

The Kremlin-controlled Rossiya network aired gripping, gruesome footage it had withheld from the public for days and said government officials had deliberately deceived the world about the number of hostages inside School No. 1. “At such moments,” anchor Sergei Brilyov declared, “society needs the truth.”

The admission of an effort to minimize the magnitude of a hostage crisis that ensnared about 1,200 people — most of them children — marked a sharp turnabout for the government of President Vladimir Putin. In previous crises with mass fatalities, such as the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in 2000 and the 2002 siege of a Moscow theater, officials covered up key facts, but never acknowledged doing so.

Russian Orthodox faithful in Moscow light candles for the peace of the victims' souls. Across the country, Russians joined in the mourning Sunday.

“It doesn’t suit our president,” a Kremlin political consultant, Gleb Pavlovsky, said on the show. “Lies, which really acted in the terrorists’ favor, did not suit him at all. Lies were weakening us and making the terrorists more violent.”

The broadcast included no apology and referred only to the most blatant misstatement by officials, the claim that 354 hostages were inside the school. It did not acknowledge the hostage takers had demanded an end to the war in Chechnya or that the government continues to give conflicting information about whether any of the guerrillas remain at large, who they were and how many were killed.