coverage on foreign television news channels (such as CNN and the BBC), the crisis was not broadcast live by the three major state-owned Russian television networks. The two main state-owned broadcasters, Channel One and Rossiya, did not interrupt their regular programming following the school seizure. After explosions and gunfire started on the third day, NTV Russia shifted away from the scenes of mayhem to broadcast a World War II soap opera. According to the Ekho Moskvy ("Echo of Moscow") radio station, 92% of the people polled said that Russian TV channels concealed parts of information. Russian state-controlled television only reported official information about the number of hostages during the course of the crisis. The figure of 354 people was persistently given, initially reported by Lev Dzugayev (the press secretary of Dzasokhov) and Valery Andreyev (the chief of the republican FSB). It was later claimed that Dzugayev only disseminated information given to him by "Russian presidential staff who were located in Beslan from September 1". Torshin laid the blame squarely at Andreyev, for whom he reserved special scorn. The deliberately false figure had grave consequences for the treatment of the hostages by their angered captors (the hostage-takers were reported saying, "Maybe we should kill enough of you to get down to that number") and contributed to the declaration of a "hunger strike". One inquiry has suggested that it may have prompted the militants to kill the group of male hostages shot on the first day. The government disinformation also sparked incidents of violence by the local residents, aware of the real numbers, against the members of Russian and foreign media. On 8 September 2004, several leading Russian and international human-rights organisations – including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Memorial, and Moscow Helsinki Group – issued a joint statement in which they pointed out the responsibility that Russian authorities bore in disseminating false information: We are also seriously concerned with the fact that authorities concealed the true scale of the crisis by, inter alia, misinforming Russian society about the number of hostages. We call on Russian authorities to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the circumstances of the Beslan events which should include an examination of how authorities informed the whole society and the families of the hostages. We call on making the results of such an investigation public." The Moscow daily tabloid Moskovskij Komsomolets ran a rubric headlined "Chronicle of Lies", detailing