A horrifying account by a survivor of the Beslan school takeover by Islamic terrorists:

Alla Gadieyeva, 24, who was taken captive with her 7-year-old son and mother, said the militants displayed terrifying brutality from the start. One gunman, whose pockets were stuffed with grenades, held up the corpse of a man just shot in front of hundreds of hostages and warned: “If a child utters even a sound, we’ll kill another one.”

When children fainted from lack of sleep, food and water, their masked and camouflaged captors simply sneered, she said, adding that adults implored children to drink their own urine in the intolerable heat of the gym.

She and other hostages said there was a little water but no food the first day. The hostages got nothing to eat or drink after that.

Gadieyeva told of three days of unspeakable horror - of children so frightened they couldn’t sleep, of captors coolly threatening to kill off hostages one by one. The gym where they were held was so cramped there was hardly room to move.

“We were in complete fear,” said Gadieyeva, who spoke to an Associated Press reporter as she lay collapsed with exhaustion on a stretcher outside a hospital. “People were praying all the time, and those that didn’t know how to pray - we taught them.”