The Russian Prosecutor General's Office has brought nine charges including banditry, terrorism, murder and abduction against the lone surviving terrorist involved in the Beslan hostage-taking, the Interfax news agency reported Tuesday.

Nurpasha Kulayev was detained during the operation to free the hostages from a school in Beslan seized by an armed group on Sept.1, Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov was quoted by Interfax assaying.

"The bodies of 14 of the 30 terrorists killed in the special operation have been identified," Ustinov said.

"When the hostages were freed, 30 dead terrorists were found. One more body of a terrorist was torn apart. One terrorist, Kulayev, was detained alive. This matches the witnesses' accounts that there were no more than 32 assailants," he said.

"Reports of some terrorists having escaped have not been confirmed," Ustinov said.

He said seven Kalashnikov assault rifles and three pistols used by the terrorists during the siege had been stolen during a terror attack in neighboring Ingushetia on June 22.

"The terrorists who took over the school were under the command of a man nicknamed 'the colonel' whose identity is being established," Ustinov said.

According to the prosecutor general, the ethnicity of the terrorists was very mixed. "Ethnicity is of no importance. They are non-humans who have no scruples or ethnicity," he said.

Ustinov confirmed that 1,156 people were held hostage in the Beslan school and that a total of 329 bodies were examined in the Vladikavkaz forensic medicine laboratory, 171 of them children, he said.

So far, 240 bodies, including 119 children, have been identified, and 84 bodies, including 52 children, remain unidentified, he added.

On Sept. 1, a group of armed militants took over 1,000 people hostage in a school in Beslan in the Russian republic of North Ossetia. The crisis ended on the third day after a fierce exchange of gunfire, leaving at least 335 people dead -- half of them children.

Source: Xinhua