"There is no ceiling at all. The roof all fell down on the children."

The hostage standoff at a school near Chechnya turned tragic Friday with hundreds of children and adults killed or injured in an afternoon of fighting that continued sporadically into the night.

The exact sequence of events Friday remained confused. It apparently started when authorities were fired upon as they tried to retrieve the bodies of people killed Wednesday when the siege began and reached a climax when Russian special forces stormed the building and fought with rebel gunmen room by room.

The school became a battlefield, with authorities deploying artillery, assault helicopters and tanks and the gunmen firing automatic weapons and grenades. In the chaos, escaping hostages were shot in the back. Booby trap bombs exploded inside the school. And the roof on a gym collapsed in a fiery heap.

In that gym, Alan Karayev, a volunteer who entered to help bring out the bodies, saw a gruesome scene. "The whole floor is covered in bodies," he said, estimating there were hundreds of dead children. "There is no ceiling at all. The roof all fell down on the children."

Authorities said that the total number of hostages was 1,200, higher than any figure previously reported. Roughly 70 percent of the hostages were children.

Men carried burned, charred and bloodied children from other parts of the school, stuffing their lifeless bodies into the sides and backs and trunks of their cars and ambulances. Some of the children appeared to have sustained shrapnel wounds inside the school, where booby traps loaded with pieces of metal reportedly had been placed.

"Many, many dead. Many dead children," said a young boy who said he had been "blown out of the window by an explosion." The distraught boy, comforted by his wailing grandmother, did not appear injured but a Washington Post reporter observed four dead children and a dead adult close by him. (Washington Post)