MOSCOW, 27 October — Russian troops, using gas to knock out Chechen fighters, stormed a Moscow theater at dawn yesterday. Ninety hostages and most of their rebel captors were killed.
More than 750 people, held since Wednesday by the secessionists, were rescued. Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev put the initial death toll among the captives at 67. But Russian news agencies later quoted the Health Ministry as saying more than 90 hostages had died.
President Vladimir Putin went on national television in the evening to ask forgiveness for the deaths. “We have not been able to save all. Forgive us,” a solemn Putin said.
Russian officials insisted they had no choice but to launch the assault after the rebels started killing hostages. “We saved more than 750 people,” Vasilyev said outside the theater where a popular musical had been brutally interrupted. All 75 foreigners, three of them American, were rescued.
The government kept silent on the type of gas used nor was there a clear explanation of how more than 100 people died. “You ask me if we used gas or not. Well, I am authorized to say that special means were used,” Vasilyev said. “That allowed us...to neutralize the kamikaze women who were strapped with explosives and held their fingers on the detonators.”
The special forces’ assault began in freezing rain before dawn when the gunmen executed two hostages. First, the unspecified gas was spread. Then forces stormed in.
Television footage showed some kicking in glass doors and opening fire, the thunder of their weapons setting off car alarm shrieks in the theater parking lot.
None of the soldiers was wearing a gas mask but some smashed windows and pulled open curtains as they went in. The hostages were brought out, some of them in the arms of special forces, most of them loaded unconscious onto city buses.
“They killed two hostages before our eyes, a woman and a man. They shot the man in the eye, there was a lot of blood,” Interfax quoted Olga Chernyak, one of the hostages, as saying from her hospital bed. She said she lost consciousness soon afterward, apparently because of the gas.
Nine of the hostages died because of heart problems, shock or lack of medicine, Vasilyev said, but how the remainder died was not specified. No children were among the dead, he said.
Fifty hostage-takers were killed — some with a bullet to the head execution-style. The young guerrilla commander, Movsar Barayev, was among those killed. Officials said three other gunmen were seized on the scene, and authorities searched the nervous city for attackers and accomplices who may have escaped.
A Federal Security Service official said the well-armed raiders had foreign links and contacts with unspecified embassies in Moscow, raising the prospect that insurgents with backing from international terrorists could be plotting other violence in Russia.
Putin thanked foreign countries for their “support in the struggle against the common foe. This foe is strong and dangerous, inhumane and cruel. It is international terrorism.”
A government official said Russia would seek the extradition of foreigners for funding Chechen separatists. Putin’s senior human rights representative, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, said extradition requests would target organizations in “certain countries, including Western ones”. He said Russian special forces were set to “neutralize leaders of groups located mostly in Chechnya or in (Georgia’s) Pankisi Gorge”.
The captives had been indulging a new Moscow craze for grandiose, Western-style musicals, in this case “Nord-Ost” (North-East) — the tale of a Russian Arctic explorer — when terror struck. By yesterday morning, the red plush theater seats were empty except for a few bodies of dead Chechen fighters.
Russian TV footage from the theater showed the corpses of several of the female captors, clad in black robes and head coverings, sprawled in the red plush seats, their heads thrown back or on their folded hands — as if asleep, except for the precisely placed bullet holes in their heads. One body was jackknifed backward over a seat. The women had canisters with metal fragments and up to two kilograms (4.5 pounds) of explosives strapped to their bodies. The assailants laid many other bombs in the hall, some with the equivalent of 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of TNT, officials said.
Chechnya’s fugitive rebel president, Aslan Maskhadov, condemned the actions of the radical faction. “We decisively reject terror as a method of reaching any goals,” he said in a statement posted on the Internet from his hiding place.
Western nations had shown some sympathy for the moderate Chechen leadership before Sept. 11, particularly in light of Russian military excesses. Signs that some Chechens might have had ties to radicals like Osama Bin Laden have changed some minds.
Russia underlined its view of the Chechen leadership as “terrorists” by telling Denmark that Putin might call off a state visit in protest at it letting Chechen exiles hold a meeting in Copenhagen next week.
