Da Vinci Code producers buy rights to Beslan film

The film-makers behind the Da Vinci Code have acquired the rights to a magazine article about the Beslan hostage crisis in a bid to take Russia's worst terrorist disaster on to the big screen.

Brian Grazer, the producer of the controversial blockbuster the Da Vinci Code, and Hollywood giants Universal Pictures have bought the right to convert an 18,000-word article about the hostage crisis published in the forthcoming edition of Esquire magazine into a script. The article, entitled The School, was written by Chris Chivers of the New York Times. Chivers covered the September 2004 siege during which 331 people, most of them schoolchildren, died when the three-day standoff in southern Russia ended in a bloody and chaotic gunfight.

Mr Grazer said that the article "captures for the first time the human aspect of a horrendous event that we believe will live on in the Russian psyche forever. It is a story that cries out to be told on the big screen and I have no doubt it will make an unforgettable motion picture".

Relatives of the dead are still angry about the official explanation for the handling of the siege. A parliamentary inquiry begun immediately after the crisis has delayed the release of it conclusions for the second time until this July. The media have since provided some of the most detailed investigations of the siege.

The news comes as judges are midway through reading out the verdict against the only one of the 32 militants from the school siege to survive. Nurpashi Kulayev, 26, a Chechen carpenter, will almost certainly be found guilty of terrorism and the prosecution has called for his execution. Although Russia imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in 1997, the Beslan tragedy reignited public debate over whether it should be reinstated.

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