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Siege ends amid bloodshed
26/10/2002 18:20 - (SA)
Jonathan Thatcher
Moscow - Russian special forces, using gas to knock out Chechen guerrillas, stormed a Moscow theatre on Saturday in a dawn raid that left dozens of hostages dead along with most of their rebel captors.
More than 750 people, held since Wednesday by the heavily armed Muslim guerrillas, were rescued, Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev said.
He 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.
Nearly all the rebels were killed - 50, including 18 women, according to FSB security service officials. A local radio station said three were widows of Chechen guerrilla leaders.
"We saved more than 750 people," Vasilyev said outside the theatre where a popular musical had been brutally interrupted.
A doctor from Moscow's main emergency hospital said he was treating 42 patients for gas poisoning.
"We have only been given general information that it was an incapacitating or calming agent but we do not know specifically the nature of the substance," US ambassador Alexander Vershbow said. 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. Reporters outside the theatre heard both gunfire and explosions.
"You ask me if we used gas or not. Well, I am authorised to say that special means were used," Vasilyev said. "That allowed us...to neutralise the kamikaze women who were strapped with explosives and held their fingers on the detonators."
Grenades and tracer bullets
The end of the siege, thrusting ordinary Muscovites into the frontline of the distant Chechen war, was a relief to President Vladimir Putin, who owed his rise to power partly to a hard line against the Chechens. His authority had been sorely tested.
But it left the chances for peace in the southern frontier region seemingly as distant as ever after eight years of war.
"I see no change in Russian policy in Chechnya, maybe even it will be more tragic," said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent political and military analyst. "The rebels will get more entrenched, that means there will be new terrorist attacks, maybe much bloodier than this one, maybe also in Moscow."
Amateur video obtained by Reuters showed troops rushing into the south-east Moscow theatre to the bursting sounds of grenades and automatic fire and flashes of tracer bullets.
Some later came out along a corridor carrying bodies. Another soldier could be seen drinking what looked like a beer.
None of them was wearing a gas mask but some smashed windows and pulled open curtains as they went in.
Officials said troops forced their way into the theatre after rebels executed two hostages to press their demand that Russia pull its troops out of their homeland.
An Interfax news agency reporter, who had been among the hostages, said that a man and a woman had been killed on Saturday morning. "The man was shot in the eye and there was a lot of blood, "Interfax quoted journalist Olga Chernyak as saying. "I thought then that we would all be killed."
Guerrilla chief among the dead
Chechnya's separatist rebel president, Aslan Maskhadov, condemned the actions of the radical guerrilla faction.
"We decisively reject terror as a method of reaching any goals," he said in a statement on the Internet.
"We cannot come down to the level of our opponents, targeting innocent people," Maskhadov aide Akhmed Zakayev said.
The young guerrilla commander, Movsar Barayev, was among those killed in an assault that the government's Vasilyev said had prevented a massacre among the theatre-goers.
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.
By Saturday morning, the red plush theatre seats were empty except for a few black-clad bodies of dead Chechen guerrillas.
One, a woman, was slumped back in a chair with her mouth gaping open, a bag of explosives tied to her front.
"We succeeded in preventing mass deaths and the collapse of the building which we had been threatened with," Vasilyev said as ambulances took away survivors, many of them unconscious.
The guerrillas' daring raid had set Putin the toughest test of his two and a half years in the Kremlin. It was his decision to send troops back into Chechnya in 1999 that helped propel him into the presidency and won him the reputation as a tough, effective leader able to save Russia from looming anarchy.
He went on national television on Friday evening to say he was open to talks with the Chechen guerrillas, but on his terms, insisting the separatists lay down their arms.
Moscow rejects full independence for Chechnya, which Russian troops first invaded in December 1994. Then President Boris Yeltsin accused Chechens of banditry and destabilising a region close to potentially rich transit routes for Caspian Sea oil.
The Kremlin also fears that sovereignty for the Chechens, who have chafed at Moscow rule for the past two centuries, could begin the break-up of the vast Russian Federation.
'Like Sep 11'
Some analysts have said the siege would almost certainly tarnish Putin's position, if only by showing the law and order he promised could be so easily upset by a band of rebels.
But one bystander, Igor Konstantinov, in his 60s, was in no doubt about what he thought, comparing the campaign against the Chechens to US President George W. Bush's war on terrorism:
"Putin has only one choice. Bush showed the world what to do with these bastards after September 11.
"It's Putin's turn to liquidate them in Russia."
Putin himself makes that link. He enthusiastically backed Bush after last year's September 11 attacks.
Western nations had shown some sympathy for the moderate Chechen leadership before September 11, particularly in light of Russian military excesses. Signs that some Chechens have ties to radical Islamists like Osama bin Laden have changed some minds.
On Saturday, however, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin repeated the European Union position that some form of negotiated settlement was needed to end the conflict.
Many Russians question whether Putin's tough approach is succeeding and point to recent successes for the rebels.
One problem, though, is whom he could talk to. Maskhadov was elected in an internationally monitored poll in 1997 after his guerrilla army forced Yeltsin to pull out Russian troops. But his authority has been undermined by bandit warlords and Islamist radicals who see him as too moderate in his approach.
- Reuters
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