67 hostages killed in theatre siege

Sixty seven hostages in the Moscow theatre crisis have been killed.

But the Deputy Interior Minister says more than 750 hostages were saved.

Special forces stormed the theatre where Chechen gunmen were holding hundreds of hostages before dawn, killing their leader and dozens of other gunmen.

The raid was accompanied by the release of sleeping gas inside the theatre and many of the freed hostages who were taken to hospitals in city buses were unconscious or having clear difficulty walking.

None of the foreigners who were among the approximately 700 hostages was killed during the crisis, which began on Wednesday night.

Shortly after the storming, officials said some of the estimated 50 gunmen were believed to have fled during the chaos and melted into the Russian capital, but Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev told President Vladimir Putin hours later none of the captors had escaped.

He said 32 of the gunmen were killed and an unspecified number seized. In the same meeting with Putin, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said about 30 accomplices of the gunmen had been arrested in the Moscow area, but details are not immediately available.

The hostage-takers had earlier threatened to begin killing their captives at dawn today. After the two deaths, officials reached the captors by phone but then quickly said their negotiations had failed, and the raid began.

Russian television footage from inside the theatre showed the camouflage-clad body of the gunmen's leader Movsar Barayev, lying on his back amid blood and broken glass, a cognac bottle placed at one of his lifeless hands.

In the theatre hall, 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.