MOSCOW, Sept. 4 (Xinhuanet) -- At least 322 people, including 155 children, were killed in the three-day hostage crisis in a southern Russian school, Russia's Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said on Saturday.

    "We are still identifying the bodies. We have recovered 322 bodies, and 155 of them are children," Fridinsky was quoted by theItar-Tass news agency as saying.

    The prosecutor said the death toll will probably grow as the clean-up operation is continuing at the site, but it will not rise considerably.

    Emergency workers pulled the bodies out of the school on Saturday, after Russian special forces rescued more than 400 children and adults hostages in a special operation that had suppressed the hostage-taking standoff by Friday night.

    Valery Andreyev, regional chief of the Federal Security Service(FSB), said Friday that over 30 armed militants took part in the hostage-taking crisis and Russian troops captured three of them alive on Friday, according to the Interfax news agency.

    He said people of Russian origin and foreign nationals were among the killed hostage-takers. Earlier official information showed that ten Arab militants were killed in Friday's raid.

    Andreyev said a large amount of explosives and mines planted by hostage-takers in the school have been found, which "may suggest that the terrorists had prepared for the terrorist attack in advance," Interfax reported.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit early Saturday to the southern Russian town of Beslan where commandos stormed the school to end the hostage crisis, accusing the attackers of trying to spark an ethnic conflict that would engulf Russia's troubled Caucasus Mountains region. Enditem