VLADIKAVKAZ -- "You should be killed and your body thrown to the pigs!" was the daily curse that mothers of children killed in last September's Beslan school attack hurled at the sole surviving hostage-taker, Nur-Pashi Kulayev, when he went on trial in a Vladikavkaz court last month.

Yet as Kulayev's version of events inside the school unfolded, it contradicted the version put forward by the authorities in crucial details. As the hearings continued, the women's attitude began to change.

After having heard officials publicly lie about the number of hostages inside the school and make other contradictory statements during the crisis, the mothers said they had no confidence in the prosecutor's version of events and found Kulayev's testimony more plausible. Some even started to show signs of sympathy for the suspected terrorist as he told his story of the storming of Beslan's School No. 1, in which more than 330 hostages, many of them children, died.

"They've dumped the blame onto this one man; they've found a scapegoat," said a voice from the crowd of relatives and witnesses at the North Ossetian Supreme Court as a handcuffed Kulayev was led past them on Tuesday.

The relatives say they believe this haggard and gloomy young man, who avoids looking them in the eyes and speaks in stumbling Russian from the defendant's steel cage, is their only hope to learn the truth about what happened to their loved ones. They say they are even prepared to ask the judge for leniency or a pardon, if Kulayev can tell them the truth.

"We need him to tell the truth. And we need for no force to be used against him by interested institutions. ... We need to be confident that he won't die of a heart attack or fall down the stairs," Susanna Dudiyeva, who leads the activist group Committee of Beslan Mothers, said in court Tuesday.

At a hearing last week, Kulayev testified that a bomb that had been set up by the hostage-takers detonated on Sept. 3 after Russian snipers shot a gunman who was keeping his foot on the detonators. This contradicted what the authorities said, which was that a bomb in the school gym, where the more than 1,200 hostages were being held, went off after it fell from a basketball hoop.

The official version had the bomb going off after tape fixing it to the hoop came loose because of heat and humidity, causing it to fall.

The explosion set off the storming of the building by security services and local vigilantes, in which hundreds of hostages died in a hail of bullets and explosions.

Kulayev was among a group of 33 gunmen who had been sent by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and had arrived at the school early on the morning of Sept. 1. He told the court that there were other gunmen inside who opened fire into the crowd of children and parents in the schoolyard. He testified that the gunmen had so much arms and ammunition that they could not have brought it all with them. Kulayev's account tallied with claims by Beslan residents that the terrorists had prepared the raid well in advance and hidden supplies of weapons at the school.

Federal officials have denied that such a weapons cache existed, though several witnesses among the hostages said it did. Kulayev's statements also contradicted the official account that there were only 33 attackers, and that none of them managed to flee the school.

Prosecutors say they are not surprised by Kulayev's revelations. "This is his line of defense," Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel, the lead prosecutor in the case, said last week.

But for those who have lost relatives, Kulayev's testimony appears to fit with their suspicions of a coverup by the authorities, whom they blame as much as the terrorists for the bloody conclusion to the hostage-taking drama.

"I will claim all the compensation from the state. What use is there in seeking damages from Kulayev?" Alexander Gumetsev, whose daughter was killed in the school, said at the courthouse on Tuesday.

In total, 1,343 people are registered as plaintiffs in the case, in which Kulayev faces life in prison if convicted of all charges.

He has denied all but one charge: participating in an illegal armed formation, the legal term the state uses for rebel fighters in Chechnya.

After survivors and hostages' relatives showed irritation with Kulayev's long hair on the first day of the trial, Kulayev's head was shaved.

During the trial, Kulayev said that his testimony in court was different from what he was reported as saying during the investigation because of his poor knowledge of Russian and that he had signed interrogation protocols without reading them.

Dudiyeva asked him Tuesday whether he had been beaten during the investigation.

"How come they haven't been beating me? Of course, I was beaten," he said.

What followed, no one predicted.

"If you tell the truth, we are ready to appeal for a pardon for you," Dudiyeva said. "Just tell the truth about what you know."

Prosecutor Maria Semisynova reacted by saying in a mocking tone that maybe Kulayev's status in the trial should be changed from that of defendant to victim.

"Who set up the booby traps and hung the bombs in the gym that exploded and killed your children?" Semisynova said. "Were these people not terrorists?"

Also on Tuesday, the plaintiffs announced that they would demand to have Kulayev's court-appointed defense lawyer, Albert Pliyev, changed, citing Pliyev's inertness in defending his client.

In an interview with Izvestia last week, Pliyev said that he had agreed to take Kulayev's case after being begged to do so by the head of North Ossetian lawyers' association. Other lawyers in the republic had refused to defend Kulayev.

Not all of the relatives and survivors believe that Kulayev deserves leniency.

Natalya Salamova, whose daughter -- a teacher at the school -- died in the attack, told the court Thursday that Kulayev should be handed over to the mothers so they could tear him apart.

During the same court session, Roza Alikova, who lost two sisters and three nephews in the attack, called for Kulayev's execution, even though capital punishment has been suspended in Russia, Interfax reported.

Another witness and mother of one of the children held hostage, Ella Dzasarova, told the court Thursday that she saw Kulayev run around the gym on the first day of the hostage-taking, shouting curses at hostages and threatening to shoot them, the agency reported.

Two psychiatrists who offered differing expert opinions in another high-profile North Caucasus court case, the murder trial of Colonel Yury Budanov, said they did not believe that survivors of the Beslan attack were suffering from "Stockholm syndrome," a condition that can occur when hostages come to sympathize with their captors and blame the authorities for their plight.

"For this to happen, people need to put themselves in the place of a hostage-taker, to understand his motives," said Lyubov Vinogradova, a director at the Independent Psychiatric Association. "This is probably not the case at the Vladikavkaz court."

The Serbsky Institute of Psychiatry's Tamara Pechernikova, a senior psychiatrist who during the Soviet era was involved in the cases of several prominent dissidents, said that the plaintiffs were pursuing the only available, and absolutely rational, strategy for learning the truth about the events that affected their lives so tragically.

"Kulayev is the only person whom they believe may tell them something in the court that would allow them to demand punishment of all those guilty in what happened," she said.

"After his sentence is announced -- and it will most probably be a long one -- these victims will demand more punishment for him," she said.

Staff Writer Nabi Abdullaev reported from Moscow.